Annotating a Fable in Italian Sign Language (LIS)

Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), pages 6025–6034 Marseille, 11–16 May 2020 c⃝ European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC 6025 Annotating a Fable in Italian Sign Language (LIS) Serena Trolvi, Rodolfo Delmonte Ca’ Foscari University of Venice Ca’ Bembo - Department of Language Sciences 841996@stud.unive.it, delmont@unive.it Abstract This paper introduces work carried out for the automatic generation of a written text in Italian starting from glosses of a fable in Italian Sign Language (LIS). The paper gives a brief overview of sign languages (SLs) and some peculiarities of SL fables such as the use of space, the strategy of Role Shift and classifiers. It also presents the annotation of the fable “The Tortoise and the Hare” - signed in LIS and made available by Alba Cooperativa Sociale -, which was annotated manually by first author for her master’s thesis. The annotation was the starting point of a generation process that allowed us to automatically generate a text in Italian starting from LIS glosses. LIS sentences have been transcribed with Italian words into tables on simultaneous layers, each of which contains specific linguistic or non-linguistic pieces of information. In addition, the present work discusses problems encountered in the annotation and generation process. Keywords: Italian Sign Language, annotation, fables, Natural Language Generation 1. Introduction This paper presents work carried out for the automatic gen- eration of a written text in Italian starting from glosses of a fable in Italian Sign Language (LIS). Sign Languages (SLs) are languages used worldwide by Deaf1 communities. They are natural languages, like spo- ken languages. However there is a crucial difference be- tween them: communication occurs through the vocal- auditory channel in spoken languages; sign languages op- erate within a different modality instead and employ the visual-manual channel. This allows signers to use the whole upper body to communicate. In fact, SLs are not ex- pressed using only the hands: non-manual articulators like head, eye gaze and shoulders play a crucial role too. Hence, it can be easily inferred that information is often conveyed simultaneously. Signed narratives are very common in Deaf communities (Valli and Lucas, 2000) and fables are also popular. Fables are short or medium-length stories with a moral and they generally have specific characteristics in SLs that are usu- ally not to be found in spoken languages like Italian. In this paper we present the annotation method used for the fable “The Tortoise and the Hare” - signed in LIS and made available by Alba Cooperativa Sociale -, which was anno- tated manually by first author for her master’s thesis. It is about a tortoise and a hare that decide to have a race. As de- scribed in another paper (Delmonte and Trolvi, 2020), the annotation of the story was the starting point of a genera- tion experiment that allowed us to automatically generate a text in Italian starting from LIS glosses. The story was annotated transcribing LIS information with Italian words into tables on simultaneous …

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