A hybrid formalism to parse Sign Languages

Sign Language (SL) linguistic is dependent on the expensive task of annotating. Some automation is already available for low-level information (eg. body part tracking) and the lexical level has shown significant progresses. The syntactic level lacks annotated corpora as well as complete and consistent models. This article presents a solution for the automatic annotation of SL syntactic elements. It exposes a formalism able to represent both constituency-based and dependency-based models. The first enable the representation the structures one may want to annotate, the second aims at fulfilling the holes of the first. A parser is presented and used to conduct two experiments on the solution. One experiment is on a real corpus, the other is on a synthetic corpus.

Sign Language Gibberish for syntactic parsing evaluation

Sign Language (SL) automatic processing slowly progresses bottom-up. The field has seen proposition to handle the video signal, to recognize and synthesize sublexical and lexical units. It starts to see the development of supra-lexical processing. But the recognition, at this level, lacks data. The syntax of SL appears very specific as it uses massively the multiplicity of articulators and its access to the spatial dimensions. Therefore new parsing techniques are developed. However these need to be evaluated. The shortage on real data restrains the corpus-based models to small sizes. We propose here a solution to produce data-sets for the evaluation of parsers on the specific properties of SL. The article first describes the general model used to generates dependency grammars and the phrase generation from these lasts. It then discusses the limits of approach. The solution shows to be of particular interest to evaluate the scalability of the techniques on big models.