Signbank: Software to Support Web Based Dictionaries of Sign Language

Signbank: Software to Support Web Based Dictionaries of Sign Language Steve Cassidy∗, Onno Crasborn†, Henri Nieminen‡, Wessel Stoop†, Micha Hulsbosch†, Susan Even†, Erwin Komen†, Trevor Johnston∗ ∗Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia, {steve.cassidy, trevor.johnston}@mq.edu.au; †Centre for Language Studies, Radboud University; PO Box 9103, 6500 HD Nijmegen, The Netherlands; {o.crasborn, w.stoop, m.hulsbosch, e.komen, s.even}@let.ru.nl; ‡University of Jyv¨askyl¨a , Jyv¨askyl¨a, Finland henri.i.nieminen@student.jyu.fi Abstract Signbank is a web application that was originally built to support the Auslan Signbank on-line web dictionary, it was an Open Source re-implementation of an earlier version of that site. The application provides a framework for the development of a rich lexical database of sign language augmented with video samples of signs. As an Open Source project, the original Signbank has formed the basis of a number of new sign language dictionaries and corpora including those for British Sign Language, Sign Language of the Netherlands and Finnish Sign Language. Versions are under development for American Sign Language and Flemish Sign Language. This paper describes the overall architecture of the Signbank system and its representation of lexical entries and associated entities. Keywords: sign language, lexical database, dictionary, web application 1. Introduction Auslan Signbank 1 is an on-line dictionary for Australian Sign Language (Auslan) and is the latest in a long series of lexical resources for Auslan developed by Trevor John- son and others. Beginning with a Filemaker Pro database (Johnston, 2001), the Auslan lexical database has been de- veloped as a resource to inform the study of Auslan and the annotation of a corpus of Auslan video recordings (John- ston, 2008). The original web-based version of Auslan Signbank was implemented commercially using Microsoft SQL Server which incurred a significant ongoing cost and meant that any changes to the data had to be made via contract with the developers. The current version of Auslan Signbank is an open-source re-implementation of the original website, with features added to allow updates to the database by re- searchers. Once this was implemented, the web based Aus- lan Signbank became the primary version of the dataset, removing the need to maintain the Filemaker Pro database. The various Signbank websites support a range of users in- terested in sign language. In some cases, a public facing dictionary of sign language is presented with a search facil- ity allowing users to find sign videos matching keywords. Registered users can also provide feedback to the Signbank editors about missing signs or errors in the existing sign entries. In this way, Signbank acts as a resource for the deaf community to help build a shared dictionary of the language. Another class of users are researchers who are interested in using Signbank as a lexical resource in their research or in contributing to the rich lexical models in the dictionary. These researchers are able to see a much richer set of data than the public view and can use an advanced search facility 1http://auslan.org.au/ over the data. Some researchers provide detailed feedback on the signs to the editors and can help in …

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