Digging into Signs: Emerging Annotation Standards for Sign Language Corpora

This paper describes the creation of annotation standards for glossing sign language corpora as part of the Digging into Signs project (2014-2015, http://www.ru.nl/sign-lang/projects/digging-signs/). This project was based on the annotation of two major sign language corpora, the BSL Corpus (British Sign Language) and the Corpus NGT (Sign Language of the Netherlands). The focus of the gloss annotations in these data sets was in line with the starting point of most sign language corpora: to make general corpus annotation maximally useful regardless of the particular research focus. Therefore, the joint annotation guidelines that were the output of the project focus on basic annotation of hand activity, aiming to ensure that annotations can be made in a consistent way irrespective of the particular sign language. The annotation standard provides annotators with the means to create consistent annotations for various types of signs that in turn will facilitate cross-linguistic research. At the same time, the standard includes alternative strategies for some types of signs. In this paper we outline the key features of the joint annotation conventions arising from this project, describe the arguments around providing alternative strategies in a standard, as well as discuss reliability measures and improvement to annotation tools.