Extending AZee with Non-manual Gesture Rules for French Sign Language
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Abstract
This paper presents a study on non-manual gestures, using a formal model named AZee. This is an approach which allows to formally represent Sign Language (SL) discourses, but also to animate them with a virtual signer. As non-manual gestures are essential in SL and therefore necessary for a quality synthesis, we wanted to extend AZee with them, by adding some production rules to the AZee production set. For this purpose, we applied a methodology which allows to find new production rules on a corpus representing one hour of French Sign Language, the 40 brèves (Challant and Filhol, 2022). 23 production rules for non-manual gestures in LSF have thus been determined. We took advantage of this study to directly insert these new rules in the first corpus of AZee discourses expressions, which describe with AZee the productions in SL of the 40 brèves corpus. 533 non-manual rules were inserted in the corpus, and some updates were made. This article proposes a new version of this AZee expressions corpus.