DGS Corpus – Collection and processing of sign language data

1 January 2009

The long-term project "DGS Korpus" works with a clear approach to knowledge transfer: around 50 hours of video material from the DGS Corpus is made freely available to the language community and interested members of the public on the public online portal, complete with subtitles.

Two portals tailored to different information needs provide access to the indexed data. The first portal (MY DGS) is aimed at the deaf community and anyone interested in DGS. The second portal (MY DGS – annotated) also contains detailed annotation data, thus offering linguists the opportunity to empirically investigate various aspects of DGS in the long term.

The dictionary describes DGS signs and their meanings as they are used in the corpus. To this end, the passages in the corpus in which the respective sign occurs are evaluated. The dictionary entry provides further information about a sign, e.g., what variants there are or with which other signs the respective sign frequently occurs together (collocations). Based on the participants' metadata, we can also provide information on regional distribution.

The dictionary will be freely accessible in electronic form and will be published in its final version in 2023. The dictionary entries will gradually be made available online in a preliminary form.

Project management: Thomas Hanke, Prof. Dr. Annika Herrmann, Institute of German Sign Language

Duration: since 2009

Further information:

https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/dgs-korpus/index.php/dgs-korpus.html (German)

https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/dgs-korpus/ (English)

The project is being carried out as part of the academy program jointly funded by the federal and state governments and coordinated by the Union of German Academies of Sciences and Humanities, in cooperation with the Academy of Sciences in Hamburg.