This article deals with elaborating a data base of alignments of parallel Franch-LSF segments. This data base is meant to be searched using a concordancer which we are also designing. We wish to equip Sign Language translators with tools similar to those used in text-to-text translation. To do so, we need language resources to feed them. Already existing Sign Language corpora can be found, but do not match our needs: working around a Sign Language concordancer, the corpus must be a parallel one and provide various examples of vocabulary and grammatical construction. We started with a parallel corpus of 40 short news and 120 SL videos , which we aligned manually by segments of various length. We described the methodology we used, how we define our segments and alignments. The last part concerns how we hope to allow the data base to keep growing in a near future.

While Sign Languages have no standard written form, many signers do capture their language in some form of spontaneous graphical form. We list a few use cases (discourse preparation, deverbalising for translation, etc.) and give examples of diagrams. After hypothesising that they contain regular patterns of significant value, we propose to build a corpus of such productions. The main contribution of this paper is the specification of the elicitation protocol, explaining the variables that are likely to affect the diagrams collected. We conclude with a report on the current state of a collection following this protocol, and a few observations on the collected contents. A first prospect is the standardisation of a scheme to represent SL discourse in a way that would make them sharable. A subsequent longer-term prospect is for this scheme to be owned by users and with time be shaped into a script for their language.

Proform constructs such as classifier predicates and size and shape specifiers are essential elements of Sign Language communication, but have remained a challenge for synthesis due to their highly variable nature. In contrast to frozen signs, which may be pre-animated or recorded, their variability necessitates a new approach both to their linguistic description and to their synthesis in animation. Though the specification and animation of classifier predicates was covered in previous works, size and shape specifiers have to this date remain unaddressed. This paper presents an efficient method for linguistically describing such specifiers using a small number of rules that cover a large range of possible constructs. It continues to show that with a small number of services in a signing avatar, these descriptions can be synthesized in a natural way that captures the essential gestural actions while also including the subtleties of human motion that make the signing legible.

This article treats about a Sign Language concordancer. In the past years, the need for content translated into Sign Language has been growing, and is still growing nowadays. Yet, unlike their text-to-text counterparts, Sign Language translators are not equipped with computer-assisted translation software. As we aim to provide them with such software, we explore the possibilities offered by a first tool: a Sign Language concordancer. It includes designing an alignments database as well as a search function to browse it. Testing sessions with professionals highlight relevant use cases for their professional practices. It can either comfort the translator when the results are identical, or show the importance of context when the results are different for a same expression. This concordancer is available online, and aim to be a collaborative tool. Though our current database is small, we hope for translators to invest themselves and help us to keep it expanding.