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

美国手语（ASL）在美国有多达200万人使用，在北美其他地方也有其他用户。这项“计划拨款”的目的是使PI和她的多机构团队能够探索未来可能的国家科学基金会投资的案例，该案例由数tb的ASL视频数据（部分来自PI和她的同事先前的工作）组成的注释，公开可用且易于搜索的语料库，包括各种类型的内容，如对话，叙述，说明特定语法结构的引出句子，以及孤立的符号。PI认为，这样的资源将构成一个重要的基础设施，可以被广泛的研究团体利用，以推进语言学（美国手语的结构）、计算机视觉（机器识别手势）、视觉信息索引（通过扩大标记词汇）和教育等领域。PI指出，尽管她的团队和其他人广泛而有效地使用了现有语料库，但由于硬件和软件的限制，使得搜索、识别和共享感兴趣的数据变得很麻烦，因此现有语料库的潜在价值在很大程度上仍未得到开发。更广泛的影响：通过一个用户友好的基于web的界面，研究界和广大公众可以很容易地访问新资源。在线资源的可用性将允许美国手语教师和用户以及其他人直接访问数据。用户可以通过提交一个未知标志的视频来查找该标志。美国手语的学生将能够检索视频，展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。美国手语教师和聋人教师可以很容易地获得各种母语手语使用的词汇项目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.