TheRuSLan: Database of Russian Sign Language

Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), pages 6079–6085 Marseille, 11–16 May 2020 c⃝ European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC 6079 TheRuSLan: Database of Russian Sign Language Ildar Kagirov, Denis Ivanko, Dmitry Ryumin, Alexander Axyonov, Alexey Karpov St. Petersburg Institute for Informatics and Automation of the Russian Academy of Sciences St. Petersburg, Russia {kagirov, karpov}@iias.spb.su, denis.ivanko11@gmail.com, {a.aksenov95, dl_03.03.1991}@mail.ru Abstract In this paper, a new Russian sign language multimedia database TheRuSLan is presented. The database includes lexical units (single words and phrases) from Russian sign language within one subject area, namely, "food products at the supermarket", and was collected using MS Kinect 2.0 device including both FullHD video and the depth map modes, which provides new opportunities for the lexicographical description of the Russian sign language vocabulary and enhances research in the field of automatic gesture recognition. Russian sign language has an official status in Russia, and over 120,000 deaf people in Russia and its neighboring countries use it as their first language. Russian sign language has no writing system, is poorly described and belongs to the low-resource languages. The authors formulate the basic principles of annotation of sign words, based on the collected data, and reveal the content of the collected database. In the future, the database will be expanded and comprise more lexical units. The database is explicitly made for the task of creating an automatic system for Russian sign language recognition. Keywords: Russian sign language, low resourced languages, corpora annotation, image recognition, machine learning 1. Introduction This paper presents the electronic lexical database of Russian sign language (RSL) collected for one subject area. The database is called TheRuSLan (Thesaurus Russian Sign Language (TheRuSLan, 2019)) and is the first of a kind for Russian sign language. As the authors believe, the collected database can be helpful in tasks of machine learning, gesture and sign language automatic recognition, and sign language linguistics. The primary objective of the investigation was to create a database of RSL, which could be of interest both for linguistic research and machine learning. This was done with the use of two annotation layers: linguistic (“phonological”) and “image recognition-oriented”, i.e. class labeling. The paper is structured as follows: after the Introduction, Section 2 provides some information about RSL as low- resourced natural language. Section 3 sketches the state-of- the-art in the field of corpora and databases of RSL. In Section 4, the authors present their view on building RSL corpora, and provide the basic distinctive features used to annotate the collected database. Following this, Sections 5 and 6 contain information concerning collecting data and general features of the database. Eventually, the last section 7, serves as round-up of the paper where we discuss all the obtained results as well as the main conclusions. 2. Russian Sign Language as a Low- Resourced Language RSL is the language of communication used by the deaf community in Russia and some of its neighboring countries. As the statistics by the Ethnologue international catalog (www.ethnologue.com) …

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