Collaborative Research: II-EN: Development of Publicly Available, Easily Searchable, Linguistically Analyzed, Video Corpora for Sign Language and Gesture Research

美国手语（American Sign Language，简称ASL）在美国有200万人使用，在北美其他地区也有更多的使用者。 这项“规划拨款”的目的是使PI和她的多机构团队能够探索NSF未来可能投资于注释的、公开可用的、易于搜索的由TB级ASL视频数据组成的语料库的案例（部分来自PI及其同事先前的工作），包括各种类型的内容，如对话，叙述，引出的句子说明具体的语法结构，和孤立的迹象。 PI认为，这样的资源将构成一个重要的基础设施，将被广泛的研究社区利用，以推进语言学（ASL的结构），计算机视觉（手势的机器识别），视觉信息的索引（通过扩展标记词汇）和教育领域。 PI指出，现有语料库的潜在价值在很大程度上仍未得到开发，尽管她的团队和其他人广泛而富有成效地使用它们，但由于硬件和软件的限制，搜索，识别和共享感兴趣的数据变得很麻烦。 更广泛的影响：研究界和广大公众将通过方便用户的网络界面，方便地获取新的资源。 在线资源的可用性将使美国手语教师和用户以及其他人能够直接访问数据。 用户将能够通过提交该标志的视频示例来查找未知标志。 美国手语的学生将能够检索视频显示在实际句子中使用的特定符号的例子，或语法结构的例子。 聋人的美国手语教师和教师可以很容易地获得各种母语手语使用者所使用的词汇和语法结构的视频示例，用于语言教学和评估。

American Sign Language (ASL) is used by as many as two million people in the United States, with additional users elsewhere in North America. The purpose of this "planning grant" is to enable the PI and her multi-institutional team to explore the case for a possible future NSF investment in an annotated, publicly available, and easily searchable corpus consisting of terabytes of ASL video data (deriving in part from prior work by the PI and her colleagues), including diverse types of content such as dialogues, narratives, elicited sentences illustrating specific grammatical constructions, and isolated signs. The PI contends such a resource would constitute an important infrastructure that would be exploited by a broad research community to advance the fields of linguistics (the structure of ASL), computer vision (machine recognition of gestures), indexing of visual information (through the expansion of mark up vocabularies), and education. The PI notes that the potential value of the existing corpora remains largely untapped, notwithstanding their extensive and productive use by her team and others, due to hardware and software limitations that make it cumbersome to search, identify, and share data of interest. Broader Impacts: The new resource would be easily accessible by the research community and the broader public, via a user-friendly Web-based interface. Availability of the resource online would allow ASL teachers and users, and others, to access the data directly. Users would be able to look up an unknown sign by submitting a video example of that sign. Students of ASL would be able to retrieve video showing examples of a specific sign used in actual sentences, or examples of a grammatical construction. ASL instructors and teachers of the Deaf would have easy access to video examples of lexical items and grammatical constructions as used by a variety of native signers, for use in language instruction and evaluation.