SMILE Swiss German Sign Language Dataset
Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)
Abstract
Sign language recognition (SLR) involves identifying the form and meaning of isolated signs or sequences of signs. To our knowledge, the combination of SLR and sign language assessment is novel. The goal of an ongoing three-year project in Switzerland is to pioneer an assessment system for lexical signs of Swiss German Sign Language (Deutschschweizerische Gebärdensprache, DSGS) that relies on SLR. The assessment system aims to give adult L2 learners of DSGS feedback on the correctness of the manual parameters (handshape, hand position, location, and movement) of isolated signs they produce. In its initial version, the system will include automatic feedback for a subset of a DSGS vocabulary production test consisting of 100 lexical items. To provide the SLR component of the assessment system with sufficient training samples, a large-scale dataset containing videotaped repeated productions of the 100 items of the vocabulary test with associated transcriptions and annotations was created, consisting of data from 11 adult L1 signers and 19 adult L2 learners of DSGS. This paper introduces the dataset, which will be made available to the research community.