ASL video Corpora & Sign Bank: resources available through the American Sign Language Linguistic Research Project (ASLLRP)
Neidle, Carol; Opoku, Augustine; Metaxas, Dimitris
The American Sign Language Linguistic Research Project (ASLLRP) provides Internet access to
high-quality ASL video data, generally including front and side views and a close-up of the face.
The manual and non-manual components of the signing have been linguistically annotated using
SignStream®. The recently expanded video corpora can be browsed and searched through the Data
Access Interface (DAI 2) we have designed; it is possible to carry out complex searches. The data
from our corpora can also be downloaded; annotations are available in an XML export format. We
have also developed the ASLLRP Sign Bank, which contains almost 6,000 sign entries for lexical
signs, with distinct English-based glosses, with a total of 41,830 examples of lexical signs (in addition
to about 300 gestures, over 1,000 fingerspelled signs, and 475 classifier examples). The Sign Bank is
likewise accessible and searchable on the Internet; it can also be accessed from within SignStream®
(software to facilitate linguistic annotation and analysis of visual language data) to make
annotations more accurate and efficient. Here we describe the available resources. These data have
been used for many types of research in linguistics and in computer-based sign language recognition
from video; examples of such research are provided in the latter part of this article.
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