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Sign Language Corpus Annotation: toward a new Methodology

This paper deals with non manual gestures annotation involved in Sign Language within the context of automatic generation of Sign Language. We will tackle linguistic researches in sign language, present descriptions of non manual gestures and problems lead to movement description. Then, we will propose a new annotation methodology, which allows non manual gestures description. This methodology can describe all Non Manual Gestures with precision, economy and simplicity. It is based on four points: Movement description (instead of position description); Movement decomposition (the diagonal movement is described with horizontal movement and vertical movement separately); Element decomposition (we separate higher eyelid and lower eyelid); Use of a set of symbols rather than words. One symbol can describe many phenomena (with use of colours, height...). First analysis results allow us to define precisely the structure of eye blinking and give the very first ideas for the rules to be designed. All the results must be refined and confirmed by extending the study on the whole corpus. In a second step, our annotation will be used to produce analyses in order to define rules and structure definition of Non Manual Gestures that will be evaluate in LIMSI’s automatic French Sign Language generation system.