[Slling-l] 2nd CfP: LREC workshop on sign languages

[Thomas Hanke]

2nd CALL FOR PAPERS

8th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Involving the Language Community
LREC Satellite Workshop in Miyazaki, Japan, May 12, 2018

Abstracts are invited for a full day workshop on sign language resources, to take place following the 2018 LREC conference. Recent technological developments allow sign language researchers to create relatively large video corpora of sign language use that were unimaginable twenty years ago. Several national projects are currently underway, and more are planned. This workshop aims to share experiences from current and past efforts. What are the problems that were encountered and the solutions created, what are the linguistic decisions taken?

For 2018, the hot topic is “Involving the Language Community”: For any language technology developing, it is important to involve the language community as the potential user group of that technology as early as possible. This is even more true for minority languages such as sign languages.

Most current sign language corpus projects have collected their own data by either inviting language community members to their video studios or by visiting community members in their living rooms, bringing their video cameras. Recent approaches try to profit from the internet becoming a central piece of most citizens’ life, by using pre-existing sign language data on the web, or by using social media channels to get people involved, either for the main data collection or for second-wave collections to fill gaps left or to ask for votes. How do these approaches combine, and what are the implications for the corpora built? As both annotation and translation of sign language data are most time-consuming and thus expensive, it is tempting to get volunteers from the language community involved in these tasks as well. How far do you get with such crowd or community sourcing approaches? How can a meaningful and economical quality control be established? And what is the return on investment for the community?

Many corpus projects follow an evolutionary approach, publishing data in phases over the course of the project. How can these projects profit from user feedback on data already published, what workflows are needed to deal with feedback in a timely manner? How do we establish “virtual focus groups” to discuss upcoming sign language technology user interfaces (such as avatar technology) with interested members of the language community?

Aside from the “hot topic”, the workshop will continue to cover progress on more general issues in research on sign language corpora and tools.

We invite abstracts for 20-minute papers or posters (with or without demonstrations) on the following topics:


INVOLVING THE LANGUAGE COMMUNITY

	• “Internet as a Corpus” for sign languages
	• Online voting systems for signers
	• Crowd and community sourcing for corpus work
	• Virtual focus groups
	• Future sign language technology user interfaces such as avatar technology
	• Ethical and legal aspects


GENERAL ISSUES ON SIGN LANGUAGE CORPORA AND TOOLS

	• Avatar technology as a tool in sign language corpora and corpus data feeding into advances in avatar technology
	• Experiences in building sign language corpora
	• Elicitation methodology appropriate for corpus collection
	• Proposals for standards for linguistic annotation or for metadata descriptions
	• Experiences from linguistic research using corpora
	• Use of (parallel) corpora and lexicons in translation studies and machine translation
	• Language documentation and long-term accessibility for sign language data
	• Video compression and streaming for sign language
	• Annotation and Visualization Tools
	• Linking corpora and lexicons and integrated presentation of corpus and dictionary contents
	• Computer recognition of sign language and steps towards automatic annotation
	• Sign language corpus mining

In the tradition of LREC, oral/signed presentations and poster presentations (with or without demonstrations) have equal status, and authors are encouraged to suggest the presentation format best suited to communicate their ideas. Papers of both oral/signed presentations and poster presentations of this workshop will be published as workshop proceedings published on the conference website.

The deadline for abstracts is January 10, 2018.

For more information, please turn to the workshop website at

                  http://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec2018/

In case of questions, please contact lrec2018 (at) dgskorpus.de.


The organizing committee,

Mayumi Bono, Tokyo JP
Eleni Efthimiou, Athens GR
Evita Fotinea, Athens GR
Thomas Hanke, Hamburg DE
Julie Hochgesang, Washington US
Jette Kristoffersen, Copenhagen DK
Johanna Mesch, Stockholm SE
Yutaka Osugi, Tsukuba JP


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