Corpus à la carte – Improving Access to the Public DGS Corpus

Abstract

This article presents the fourth release of the Public DGS Corpus, a large corpus of German Sign Language (DGS). Since its first release in 2018, the Public DGS Corpus has provided its content through multiple portals to meet the needs of different user groups. Having started with a community portal and a research portal for general data access, the ANNIS portal for dynamic web-based exploration of the corpus was added in 2022. With this latest release, a fourth portal is added to allow sign language linguists to access the public corpus directly through the annotation software iLex. Furthermore, search capabilities and interconnectedness between the portals are strongly improved, allowing users to move between portals to combine their strengths. Additional improvements to the corpus include additional recordings, new pose information models, improved HamNoSys, enhanced type information and web interface revisions.