Exploiting Sign Language Corpora in Deaf Studies

Transcription

1 Trinity College Dublin Exploiting Sign Language Corpora in Deaf Studies Lorraine Leeson Trinity College Dublin SLCN Network I Berlin I 4 December 2010

2 Overview Corpora: going beyond sign linguistics research Translation & Interpreting Studies Teaching Sign Linguistics Sign Language Teaching & Learning Deaf Studies Toward Digital Repositories Humanities & Repositories Deaf Studies in this context?

3 Corpora Corpora as Digital Annotated Searchable

4 Trinity College Dublin The Digital Age We have the digital capacity We need greater investment in considering automatic tagging to increase capacity for annotation (otherwise, manual annotation is time consuming and consistency can be an issue (human error) Re: search-ability what functionality do we have in mind when we collect? Annotate? We need to go beyond the sign linguistic! But before that, lets remember that corpus studies & exploitation of corpora is relatively new.

5 Spoken Language Corpora & Missed Opportunities [T]his cornucopia [i.e. the richness of corpus data] has not been welcomed with open arms, neither by the research community nor the language teaching profession. It has been kept waiting in the wings, and only in the last few years has any serious attention been paid to it by those who consider themselves to be applied linguists. For a quarter of a century, corpus evidence was ignored, spurned and talked out of relevance, until its importance became just too obvious for it to be kept out in the cold. (Sinclair 1994: 1)..OUR AIM? Not to make this mistake regarding signed language corpora!!!

6 Going Beyond Sign Linguistics Research Raison d etre for creating corpora has been primarily linguistic in nature but there is Scope for thinking outside the box and looking at ways of maximising the impact of the data we collect and annotate to best serve the community it represents Scope for teaching and learning students and community Providing there is accessibility to digital resources/ broadband, etc. AND a willingness to move away from the chalk and talk approach! Scope for archiving, exhibiting and comparing data Research on Deaf culture/s Considering data created via European partnerships (Leonardo da Vinci Projects, Grundtvig Projects, etc.)

7 Lets start with authentic teaching & learning

8 Teaching Real Sign Linguistics From Sign Linguistics Research to teaching sign linguistics! Getting students excited about language Getting students engaged taps into intrinsic motivation Hands-on approaches - authentic learning with authentic data Offers scope for autonomous learning & Problem Based Learning (PBL) value-added learning: students are also working in digital environments, learning to use ELAN, learning to note where they find evidence (time codes, etc.) & applying their learning in a very practical way. Learning of rigorous approach to dealing with data.

9 Translation & Interpreting Studies SL corpora have a significant role to play in the teaching of interpreting and translating Issues that can be considered include: Collocational relationships Discourse structure (e.g. cohesive devices, role of body-partitioning, use of the N/D hand, discourse makers, etc.) Register/genre variation Gendered/ regional/ generational variation Metaphor/ Idiom

10 Translation & Interpreting Studies (2) Students can prepare translations in ELAN, can assist in annotating texts, or can work from texts to create a spoken language target text (e.g. in Garage Band). Students learn that there is more than one way to handle a SL text Brings students in contact with greater variability than is otherwise possible in the classroom. Cost-effective means of delivering authentic data to classes.

11 Sign Language Teaching & Learning Using the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), some moves have been made to create, annotate and utilize signed language data for online teaching and learning (BSL, ISL, Czech SL, Cypriot SL and Greek SL)(D-Signs Project, LdV, led by Bristol University). Corpus materials can support learning in such environments, where someone maps the complexity of content to the CEFR, for example.

12 Teaching Sign Language Teachers Corpora of Second Language Learners can be exploited beyond the field of L2 acquisition studies to encompass use in teacher training Milestones? Types of errors that are typical? Phonological (minimal pairs mixed up, handshape errors, movement errors, etc.) Non-manual Features (over-application/ non-application, scope, etc.) Use of signing space (e.g. blind spots ) etc. Can help teachers in training know what to expect and consider strategies for helping students progress.

13 Deaf Studies Corpora contain personal stories, histories, witness statements and political perspectives. They are snapshots of Deafhood and of the struggle in a Hearing world. Specialist corpora - thematic Corpora can contribute to archiving Deaf Histories. And digital archives on Deaf Histories can contribute to corpus building. For example, the Hidden Histories Project (led by the University of Sussex) (Grundtvig ).

14 Trinity College Dublin Deaf Studies Thematically grouped content can be drawn on for teaching and learning purposes e.g. Deaf people s relationships with their family members when growing up e.g. how mainstreaming will impact on Deaf communities in the future as per SIGNALL II Project (LdV)(Interesource Group (Ireland) Limited).

15 Digital Humanities as a general target for universities in 21 st Century. (e.g. Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations Digital Humanities

16 Toward a Digital Deaf Studies What might a digital repository for Deaf Studies look like? E.g. Web-based archives such as Jeff Davis s work on Plains Indians Signed Language/s? videos.html Potential for this functionality to be embedded in the MPI Archive? User-friendliness for nonlinguists?? Repository

17 Humanities & Repositories: Deaf Studies in Europe in this context? Some moves in progress with Deaf experience as the focus, e.g. Hidden Histories Project (UK, IRE, FI, AUS) social histories SIGNALL II (IRE, UK, FI, POLAND, CZ) - Deafhood SIGNALL 3- (IRE, UK, BE, TURKEY, FI) Includes reference to how Deaf people experience Deaf Education/ Mental Health/ Interpreting Medisigns (IRE, UK, SWEDEN, CYPRUS,POLAND) Includes Deaf people s experiences of medical domains but the data, while catalogued, is not annotated over the life of these projects. This needs addressing.

18 Perhaps using Moodle to support focused teaching & learning (e.g. SIGNALL II, SIGNALL 3, Medisigns, D-Signs (Leonardo da Vinci funded projects) Digital, thematic, but not (all) yet tagged for use in ELAN too

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20 We have Digital Data! For Example - SIGNALL II: video clips (approx. 50 hours of data) (lectures and interviews) Some clips in each of the following: Irish Sign Language British Sign Language Polish Sign Language Finnish Sign Language Czech Sign Language Plus: voiceovers in English (FI, IRE, UK), transcripts in English (IRE, UK), and Czech transcripts. Needs searchability via ELAN!!!

21 Benefits? Digital archives of social history in signed languages E.g. Holocaust survivors/ war survivors/genderedgenerational /regional varieties that are moving out of the language Digital archives of disappearing forms (e.g. gendered generational signs in ISL, regional variants in BSL) Projects can develop comparative data sets across communities (e.g. SIGNALL II)

22 Multifunctionality of data Teaching & learning purposes Research purposes Historical documentation: sharing old stories from one Deaf community with a wider world (e.g. Polish Deaf Battalion in the Warsaw Rising). SLs as endangered languages changing context of Deaf education/ access to Deaf communities and SLs

23 Challenges Collation time, money, coordination Filing systematic approach needed! Annotation resources financial & human, accuracy & consistency Storage video streaming servers, back up, updating of data (MPI Language Archives?) Sharing permissions, licensing & copyright

24 Wishlist? Collaboration & Consolidation: Build on existing networks such as those in EU projects to consolidate digital archive building Work with Deaf communities to identify what THEY want to archive & what benefits THEY want from resources gathered (e.g. Community Development courses in archiving? Access to training re: using ELAN to support their teaching?) Consolidate the resources that are available in teaching institutes for quick and dirty annotations students perform wonderfully well on authentic tasks but you have to offer them supervision and support! Be Paranoid about losing data! Back-up. Back-up. Back-up. Be Ambitious lets think big!

25 Trinity College Dublin We also need to Adapt to new technology (e.g. move away from tape toward flash (card) media to speed up film capture process Develop simple & easy to use graphic user interface (GUI) Consider scalability Develop a centralized secure repository (aka the MPI archives) Future-proof data Ensure accessibility Train & up-skill Lecturers/ Researchers

26 Go raibh maith agaibh! (Thank You!)

27 Contact me? Lorraine Leeson Director School of Linguistic, Speech & Communication Sciences Trinity College Dublin (University of Dublin) 7-9 South Leinster Street Dublin 2 IRELAND leesonl@tcd.ie

28 References Sinclair, John McH. (2004) How to Use Corpora in Language Teaching, Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Web-based Resources Digital Repositories: Helping Universities and Colleges (2005) uploaded_documents/jisc-bp-repository(he)-v1-final.pdf Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations Digital Humanities D-Signs - Handtalk Signall II Signall 3 Medisigns Hidden Histories site to be developed