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Building the first comprehensive machine-readable Turkish sign language resource: methods, challenges and solutions

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Abstract

This article describes the procedures employed during the development of the first comprehensive machine-readable Turkish Sign Language (TiD) resource: a bilingual lexical database and a parallel corpus between Turkish and TiD. In addition to sign language specific annotations (such as non-manual markers, classifiers and buoys) following the recently introduced TiD knowledge representation (Eryiğit et al. 2016), the parallel corpus contains also annotations of dependency relations, which makes it the first parallel treebank between a sign language and an auditory-vocal language.

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Notes

  1. The Swedish Sign Language Corpus Project (2017) and Östling et al. (2017) present the first dependency treebank for a sign language (Swedish Sign Language).

  2. ELAN (EUDICO Linguistic Annotator) is a professional tool for the creation of complex annotations on video and audio resources and is widely used for sign language annotation. There exist also other sign language annotation platforms such as iLEX (Hanke and Storz 2008) and SignStream (Neidle et al. 2001).

  3. Camgöz et al. (2016) introduces a sign language recognition corpus consisting of TiD signs and phrases from health and finance domains and Selçuk-Şimşek and Çiçekli (2017) a parallel dataset solely depending on word order correspondences between TiD and Turkish.

  4. This MT system is from written Turkish to avatar animated TiD.

  5. The convention in sign language and Deaf studies is that the adjective Deaf (with capital D) is used when it refers to the community, culture and signers who identify themselves as part of the Deaf community culturally. The adjective deaf (with small d) is used for the medical condition.

  6. CODA stands for Children of Deaf Adults. This acronym is used in sign language and Deaf studies to identify this special population. CODAs are special in that they usually are brought up as bilinguals: they can speak both the sign language of their parents and the local spoken language.

  7. See Eryiğit et al. (2016) for a detailed description of the annotation scheme of TiD signs.

  8. Plural formation in sign languages does not always involve simple concatenative inflection, and the form of the plurals of signs may depend on a number of factors (Kubuş 2008; Steinbach 2012).

  9. ELAN TiD Tier hierarchy is built on “included in”, “time subdivision” and “symbolic subdivision” stereotypes as exemplified in Fig. 2. The reader may refer to ELAN guidelines http://www.mpi.nl/corpus/manuals/manual-elan_ug.pdf for further details on tier stereotypes.

  10. Some Turkish sentences were difficult to translate into TiD. For instance, the sentence “How did you express this feeling of yours?” was not possible to translate directly to TiD since the Deaf consultants reported that there are no signs for the notions “feeling” and “express”. It was translated as: “How was it? Tell me.” In such cases, the TiD tier contains this later translation as well appended to its glossing within square brackets (e.g. Fig. 7).

  11. In contrast to many other sign language annotation conventions (Crasborn et al. 2015; Johnston 2016), in our annotation scheme, manual signs are not annotated based on whether they are articulated with the left/right hand or with the dominant/non-dominant hand. Therefore, two-handed signs, for instance, are annotated only on the MainFlow. We adopted this approach in order not to lose the atomicity of a sign for machine-readability purpose.

  12. It should be noted that it was not uncommon in the data for buoys and classifers to be signed with the dominant hand. In those cases, these signs were annotated in the MainFlow.

  13. Classifiers are iconic signs; however, iconic representation of an entity with a classifier may change from context to context, and from language to language (Perniss et al. 2010; Zwitserlood 2012). In other words, different classifiers may represent the same entity in different contexts. For instance, PENCIL could be expressed both with an entity and a handling classifier. If the handshape is index finger selected, the index finger represents the pencil as an entity in the context. On the other hand, if the handshape is baby-O, then it represents holding the pencil.

  14. Note that this use of the term “incorporation” differs from its common use in theoretical linguistics where it is interpreted as a morpho-syntactic operation that combines at least two syntactic heads into a complex word.

  15. Although a very recent study (Sulubacak et al. 2016a) focuses on mapping the Turkish dependency grammar to Universal Dependencies (Nivre et al. 2016), we preferred to follow Sulubacak et al. (2016b) because of our annotators’ experience on this framework, and we left mapping to the Universal Dependencies to future work.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful for the support of our signers Jale Erdul, Elvan Tamyürek Özparlak, Neslihan Kurt, our Project advisors Prof. Dr. Sumru Özsoy and Hasan Dikyuva, and of our project members Pınar Uluer, Neziha Akalın, Kenan Kasarcı, Nevzat Kırgıç, Cüneyd Ancın. Finally, we want to thank our three reviewers for insightful comments and suggestions that helped us improve the final version of the article.

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Author notes

  1. Serpil Karabüklü

    Present address: Department of Linguistics, Purdue University, West Lafayette, USA

  2. Aslı Özkul

    Present address: English Language Teacher Education, Istanbul Bilgi University, Istanbul, Turkey

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Engineering, Istanbul Technical University, Istanbul, 34469, Turkey

    Gülşen Eryiğit, Cihat Eryiğit, Tuğba Pamay, Dilara Torunoğlu-Selamet & Hatice Köse

  2. Department of Linguistics, Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, 34342, Turkey

    Serpil Karabüklü, Meltem Kelepir & Aslı Özkul

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  1. Gülşen Eryiğit
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This research is supported under the project “A Signing Avatar System for Turkish to Turkish Sign Language Machine Translation” by The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK) with a 1003 Grant (No. 114E263) and under the project “Sign-Hub” by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement No. 693349.

The convention in sign linguistics is to use the acronyms of sign languages as they are used by the Deaf community, namely, with the capital letters of the sign language name in the local spoken language. Thus, TiD represents the first letters of the Turkish words Türk İşaret Dili ‘Turkish Sign Language’.

Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 3 and 4.

Table 3 Distribution of the parts-of-speech tags in the TiD corpus
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Table 4 Distribution of the non-manual markers in the TiD corpus
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Eryiğit, G., Eryiğit, C., Karabüklü, S. et al. Building the first comprehensive machine-readable Turkish sign language resource: methods, challenges and solutions. Lang Resources & Evaluation 54, 97–121 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-019-09465-5

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