Paper-Conference | Marc Schulder

Facilitating the Spread of New Sign Language Technologies across Europe

Diese Publikation ist nur auf Englisch verfügbar.

Zusammenfassung

For developing sign language technologies like automatic translation, huge amounts of training data are required. Even the larger corpora available for some sign languages are tiny compared to the amounts of data used for corresponding spoken language technologies. The overarching goal of the European project EASIER is to develop a framework for bidirectional automatic translation between sign and spoken languages and between sign languages. One part of this multi-dimensional project is that it will pool available language resources from European sign languages into a larger dataset to address the data scarcity problem. This approach promises to open the floor for lower-resourced sign languages in Europe. This article focusses on efforts in the EASIER project to allow for new languages to make use of such technologies in the future. What are the characteristics of sign language resources needed to train recognition, translation, and synthesis algorithms, and how can other countries including those without any sign resources follow along with these developments? The efforts undertaken in EASIER include creating workflow documents and organizing training sessions in online workshops. They reflect the current state of the art, and will likely need to be updated in the coming decade.

Hope E. Morgan, Onno Crasborn, Maria Kopf, Marc Schulder, Thomas Hanke

Introducing Sign Languages to a Multilingual Wordnet: Bootstrapping Corpora and Lexical Resources of Greek Sign Language and German Sign Language

Diese Publikation ist nur auf Englisch verfügbar.

Zusammenfassung

Wordnets have been a popular lexical resource type for many years. Their sense-based representation of lexical items and numerous relation structures have been used for a variety of computational and linguistic applications. The inclusion of different wordnets into multilingual wordnet networks has further extended their use into the realm of cross-lingual research. Wordnets have been released for many spoken languages. Research has also been carried out into the creation of wordnets for several sign languages, but none have yet resulted in publicly available datasets. This article presents our own efforts towards an inclusion of sign languages in a multilingual wordnet, starting with Greek Sign Language (GSL) and German Sign Language (DGS). Based on differences in available language resources between GSL and DGS, we trial two workflows with different coverage priorities. We also explore how synergies between both workflows can be leveraged and how future work on additional sign languages could profit from building on existing sign language wordnet data. The results of our work are made publicly available.

Sam Bigeard, Marc Schulder, Maria Kopf, Thomas Hanke, Kyriaki Vasilaki, Anna Vacalopoulou, Theodore Goulas, Athanasia-Lida Dimou, Stavroula-Evita Fotinea, Eleni Efthimiou

The Sign Language Dataset Compendium: Creating an Overview of Digital Linguistic Resources

Diese Publikation ist nur auf Englisch verfügbar.

Zusammenfassung

One of the challenges that sign language researchers face is the identification of suitable language datasets, particularly for cross-lingual studies. There is no single source of information on what sign language corpora and lexical resources exist or how they compare. Instead, they have to be found through extensive literature review or word-of-mouth. The amount of information available on individual datasets can also vary widely and may be distributed across different publications, data repositories and (potentially defunct) project websites. This article introduces the Sign Language Dataset Compendium, an extensive overview of linguistic resources for sign languages. It covers existing corpora and lexical resources, as well as commonly used data collection tasks. Special attention is paid to covering resources for many different languages from around the globe. All information is provided in a standardised format to make entries comparable, but kept flexible enough to allow for differences in content. The compendium is intended as a growing resource that will be updated regularly.

Maria Kopf, Marc Schulder, Thomas Hanke

How to be FAIR when you CARE: The DGS Corpus as a Case Study of Open Science Resources for Minority Languages

Artikel und Videopräsentation über die Umsetzung ethischer Open-Data-Praxis im DGS-Korpus.

Marc Schulder, Thomas Hanke

How to be FAIR when you CARE: The DGS Corpus as a Case Study of Open Science Resources for Minority Languages

Collocations in Sign Language Lexicography: Towards Semantic Abstractions for Word Sense Discrimination

Diese Publikation ist nur auf Englisch verfügbar.

Zusammenfassung

In general monolingual lexicography a corpus-based approach to word sense discrimination (WSD) is the current standard. Automatically generated lexical profiles such as Word Sketches provide an overview on typical uses in the form of collocate lists grouped by their part of speech categories and their syntactic dependency relations to the base item. Collocates are sorted by their typicality according to frequency-based rankings. With the advancement of sign language (SL) corpora, SL lexicography can finally be based on actual language use as reflected in corpus data. In order to use such data effectively and gain new insights on sign usage, automatically generated collocation profiles need to be developed under the special conditions and circumstances of the SL data available. One of these conditions is that many of the prerequesites for the automatic syntactic parsing of corpora are not yet available for SL. In this article we describe a collocation summary generated from DGS Corpus data which is used for WSD as well as in entry-writing. The summary works based on the glosses used for lemmatisation. In addition, we explore how other resources can be utilised to add an additional layer of semantic grouping to the collocation analysis. For this experimental approach we use glosses, concepts, and wordnet supersenses.

Gabriele Langer, Marc Schulder

Extending the Public DGS Corpus in Size and Depth

Diese Publikation ist nur auf Englisch verfügbar.

Zusammenfassung

In 2018 the DGS-Korpus project published the first full release of the Public DGS Corpus. This event marked a change of focus for the project. While before most attention had been on increasing the size of the corpus, now an increase in its depth became the priority. New data formats were added, corpus annotation conventions were released and OpenPose pose information was published for all transcripts. The community and research portal websites of the corpus also received upgrades, including persistent identifiers, archival copies of previous releases and improvements to their usability on mobile devices. The research portal was enhanced even further, improving its transcript web viewer, adding a KWIC concordance view, introducing cross-references to other linguistic resources of DGS and making its entire interface available in German in addition to English. This article provides an overview of these changes, chronicling the evolution of the Public DGS Corpus from its first release in 2018, through its second release in 2019 until its third release in 2020.

Thomas Hanke, Marc Schulder, Reiner Konrad, Elena Jahn

ATC-Anno: Semantic Annotation for Air Traffic Control with Assistive Auto-Annotation

Diese Publikation ist nur auf Englisch verfügbar.

Zusammenfassung

In air traffic control, assistant systems support air traffic controllers in their work. To improve the reactivity and accuracy of the assistant, automatic speech recognition can monitor the commands uttered by the controller. However, to provide sufficient training data for the speech recognition system, many hours of air traffic communications have to be transcribed and semantically annotated. For this purpose we develop the annotation tool ATC-ANNO. It provides a number of features to support the annotator in their task, such as auto-complete suggestions for semantic tags, access to preliminary speech recognition predictions, syntax highlighting and consistency indicators. Its core assistive feature, however, is its ability to automatically generate semantic annotations. Although it is based on a simple hand-written finite state grammar, it is also able to annotate sentences that deviate from this grammar. We evaluate the impact of different fea- tures on annotator efficiency and find that automatic annotation allows annotators to cover four times as many utterances in the same time.

Marc Schulder, Johannah O'Mahony, Yury Bakanouski, Dietrich Klakow

Enhancing a Lexicon of Polarity Shifters through the Supervised Classification of Shifting Directions

Diese Publikation ist nur auf Englisch verfügbar.

Zusammenfassung

The sentiment polarity of an expression (whether it is perceived as positive, negative or neutral) can be influenced by a number of phenomena, foremost among them negation. Apart from closed-class negation words like no, not or without, negation can also be caused by so-called polarity shifters. These are content words, such as verbs, nouns or adjectives, that shift polarities in their opposite direction, e. g. abandoned in “abandoned hope” or alleviate in “alleviate pain”. Many polarity shifters can affect both positive and negative polar expressions, shifting them towards the opposing polarity. However, other shifters are restricted to a single shifting direction. Recoup shifts negative to positive in “recoup your losses”, but does not affect the positive polarity of fortune in “recoup a fortune”. Existing polarity shifter lexica only specify whether a word can, in general, cause shifting, but they do not specify when this is limited to one shifting direction. To address this issue we introduce a supervised classifier that determines the shifting direction of shifters. This classifier uses both resource-driven features, such as WordNet relations, and data-driven features like in-context polarity conflicts. Using this classifier we enhance the largest available polarity shifter lexicon.

Marc Schulder, Michael Wiegand, Josef Ruppenhofer

Automatically Creating a Lexicon of Verbal Polarity Shifters: Mono- and Cross-lingual Methods for German

Diese Publikation ist mit Ausnahme der Zusammenfassung nur auf Englisch verfügbar.

Zusammenfassung

In dieser Arbeit untersuchen wir Methoden zur Erstellung eines deutschsprachigen Lexikons polaritätsverschiebender Verben. Diese Verben, die vielfach auch Polaritätsshifter genannt werden, sind Inhaltswörter, die die Polarität einer Phrase zu ihrem entgegengesetzten Wert verschieben, wie z.B. das Verb „aufgeben“ in der Verbalphrase „alle Hoffnung aufgeben“. Das Verhalten von Polaritätsshiftern ähnelt somit dem von Negationswörtern wie „nicht“. Für robuste Sentimentanalyse werden sowohl Negationswörter als auch Polaritätsshifter benötigt. Während Listen von Negationswörtern in vielen Sprachen verfügbar sind, existiert jedoch ein Polaritätsshifter-Lexikon hinreichender Größe nur für das Englische.

Marc Schulder, Michael Wiegand, Josef Ruppenhofer

Introducing a Lexicon of Verbal Polarity Shifters for English

Diese Publikation ist nur auf Englisch verfügbar.

Zusammenfassung

The sentiment polarity of a phrase does not only depend on the polarities of its words, but also on how these are affected by their context. Negation words (e.g. not, no, never) can change the polarity of a phrase. Similarly, verbs and other content words can also act as polarity shifters (e.g. fail, deny, alleviate). While individually more sparse, they are far more numerous. Among verbs alone, there are more than 1200 shifters. However, sentiment analysis systems barely consider polarity shifters other than negation words. A major reason for this is the scarcity of lexicons and corpora that provide information on them. We introduce a lexicon of verbal polarity shifters that covers the entirety of verbs found in WordNet. We provide a fine-grained annotation of individual word senses, as well as information for each verbal shifter on the syntactic scopes that it can affect.

Marc Schulder, Michael Wiegand, Josef Ruppenhofer, Stephanie Köser