EASIER

30 July 2020

EASIER is a Horizon 2020 project that aims to design, develop, and validate a complete multilingual machine translation system that will act as a framework for barrier-free communication among deaf and hearing individuals, as well as provide a platform to support sign language content creation.

The project foresees a strong involvement of end-users in design, development, and evaluation of the EASIER ecosystem, where users of various European sign and spoken languages will be able to use their preferred language to interact with each other.

The project concept is based on a unique combination of technological sign language resources and sign language linguistics expertise. This allows for exploitation of a robust data-driven sign language recognition engine, the incorporation of a signing avatar that integrates sign language grammar and prosody features to perform the most advanced synthetic signing currently available, as well as the state-of-the-art machine translation technology that consumes both annotated and unannotated data to deal with a wide range of use scenarios.

Sign Language NLP

Marc Schulder

Research Associate in Computational Linguistics

My research interests include sign languages, natural language processing, and open science.

Publications

Statistical data from video processing other European SL datasets

Abstract EASIER has established a pipeline for processing datasets from European sign languages beyond those covered by the consortium, with the aim of providing pose analysis as an important entry point for data science on sign language resources.

Thomas Hanke, Marc Schulder

Extended Interlingual Index for the Project's Core Sign Languages and Languages covered in Work Package 9

Abstract The purpose of the interlingual index is to link the lexical resources of the sign languages of the project. This is the final project release of the index, which covers both the core sign languages of the project as well as additional sign languages.

Sam Bigeard, Maria Kopf, Marc Schulder, Thomas Hanke, Kiriaki Vasilaki, Anna Vacalopoulou, Theodor Goulas, Athanasia-Lida Dimou, Stavroula-Evita Fotinea, Eleni Efthimiou, Neil Fox, Onno Crasborn, Lianne Westenberg, Sarah Ebling, Laure Wawrinka, Johanna Mesch, Thomas Björkstrand, Anna Kuder, Joanna Wójcicka

Workshop and Training for Experts in Under-Resourced Languages – Session 2

Abstract This report describes the EASIER Autumn School, a workshop held on 25–26 September 2023 in Hamburg. Titled “Sign language data meets data science – data science meets sign linguistics”, the workshop had the goal of generating expertise for under-resourced sign languages (SLs) to extend the scope of EASIER to more European SLs.

Maria Kopf, Thomas Hanke, Marc Schulder, Sam Bigeard, Tsubasa Uchida, Giacomo Inches, Eleni Pechlivanidou

Interlingual index for the project's core sign languages

Abstract The purpose of the interlingual index is to link the lexical resources of all sign languages of the project. This is the second version of the index, which covers all the languages of the project.

EASIER Notation – A Proposal for a Gloss-based Scripting Language for Sign Language Generation Based on Lexical Data

This article is ©2023 IEEE. I recommend using the accepted version of the paper, which is open access. For the closed access published version follow the URL in the citation below, but note that most hyperlinks have been broken in that version.

Thomas Hanke, Lutz König, Reiner Konrad, Maria Kopf, Marc Schulder, Rosalee Wolfe

The Sign Language Interchange Format: Harmonising Sign Language Datasets for Computational Processing

Marc Schulder, Sam Bigeard, Thomas Hanke, Maria Kopf

Tools for harmonizing available annotations to a common format

This deliverable provides tools for harmonizing available annotations to a common interchange format.

Marc Schulder, Sam Bigeard, Maria Kopf, Thomas Hanke

Facilitating the Spread of New Sign Language Technologies across Europe

Abstract 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.

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

Abstract 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.

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

Abstract 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.

Maria Kopf, Marc Schulder, Thomas Hanke

Initial Interlingual Index for DGS and GSL

Abstract The purpose of the interlingual index is to link the lexical resources of all sign languages of the project. D6.3 is the first version of this index, covering DGS and GSL.

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