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Lexicographers working with minority languages face many challenges. When the language in question is also a sign language, circumstances specific to the visual-spatial modality have to be taken into consideration as well. In this paper, we aim to show and discuss which challenges we encounter while compiling the Digitales Wörterbuch der Deutschen Gebärdensprache (DW-DGS), the first corpus-based dictionary of German Sign Language (DGS). Some parallel the challenges minority language lexicographers of spoken languages encounter, e. g. few resources, no written tradition, and having to create one dictionary for all potential user groups, while others are specific to sign languages, e. g. representation of visual-spatial language and creating access structures for the dictionary.
To leverage the Deaf community’s increasing online presence, the web-based platform NZSL Share was launched in March 2020 to crowdsource new and previously undocumented signs, and to encourage community validation of these signs. The platform allows users to upload sign videos, comment on videos and agree or disagree with (often new) signs being proposed. It is managed by the research team that maintains the ODNZSL, which includes the authors. NZSL Share is being used by individuals as well as Deaf community groups to record and share signs of a specialist nature (e.g., school curriculum signs). NZSL Share now has close to 50 actively contributing members. Its launch coincided with the 2020 COVID-19 outbreak in New Zealand and so some of the first signs contributed were COVID-19-related, which are the focus of this paper.
We describe the status of work intending at including sign language lexical data within the OntoLex-Lemon framework. Our general goal is to provide for a multimodal extension to this framework, which was originally conceived for covering only the written and phonetic representation of lexical data. Our aim is to achieve in the longer term the same type of semantic interoperability between sign language lexical data as this is achieved for their spoken or written counterparts. We want also to achieve this goal across modalities: between sign language lexical data and spoken/written lexical data.