Gloss annotations in the Swedish Sign Language Corpus

Abstract

The Swedish Sign Language Corpus (SSLC) was compiled during the years 2009–2011 and consists of video-recorded conversations with 42 informants between the ages of 20 and 82 from three separate regions in Sweden. The overall aim of the project was to create a corpus of Swedish Sign Language (SSL) that could provide a core data source for research on language structure and use, as well as for dictionary work. A portion of the corpus has been annotated with glosses for signs and Swedish translations, and annotation of the entire corpus is ongoing. In this paper, we outline our scheme for gloss annotation and discuss issues that are relevant in creating the annotation system, with unique glosses for lexical signs, fingerspelling and productive signs. The annotation guidelines discussed in this paper cover both one- and two-handed signs in SSL, based on 33,600 tokens collected for the SSLC.