Maria Kopf


2024

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The EASIER Mobile Application and Avatar End-User Evaluation Methodology
Frankie Picron | Davy Van Landuyt | Rehana Omardeen | Eleni Efthimiou | Rosalee Wolfe | Stavroula-Evita Fotinea | Theodore Goulas | Christian Tismer | Maria Kopf | Thomas Hanke
Proceedings of the LREC-COLING 2024 11th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Evaluation of Sign Language Resources

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Signs and Synonymity: Continuing Development of the Multilingual Sign Language Wordnet
Marc Schulder | Sam Bigeard | Maria Kopf | Thomas Hanke | Anna Kuder | Joanna Wójcicka | Johanna Mesch | Thomas Björkstrand | Anna Vacalopoulou | Kyriaki Vasilaki | Theodore Goulas | Stavroula-Evita Fotinea | Eleni Efthimiou
Proceedings of the LREC-COLING 2024 11th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Evaluation of Sign Language Resources

2022

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Introducing Sign Languages to a Multilingual Wordnet: Bootstrapping Corpora and Lexical Resources of Greek Sign Language and German Sign Language
Sam Bigeard | Marc Schulder | Maria Kopf | Thomas Hanke | Kyriaki Vasilaki | Anna Vacalopoulou | Theodore Goulas | Athanasia-Lida Dimou | Stavroula-Evita Fotinea | Eleni Efthimiou
Proceedings of the LREC2022 10th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Multilingual Sign Language Resources

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.

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The Sign Language Dataset Compendium: Creating an Overview of Digital Linguistic Resources
Maria Kopf | Marc Schulder | Thomas Hanke
Proceedings of the LREC2022 10th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Multilingual Sign Language Resources

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.

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Facilitating the Spread of New Sign Language Technologies across Europe
Hope Morgan | Onno Crasborn | Maria Kopf | Marc Schulder | Thomas Hanke
Proceedings of the LREC2022 10th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Multilingual Sign Language Resources

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.