Announcement

A systematic linguistic study of sign language has formally acknowledged and established sign language as a natural human language, the only difference being that it is expressed in a different modality. The study of sign language has contributed significantly not only in our understanding of natural human language but also in shaping policies and practices regarding deafness and sign language in the field of education as well as in the socio-economic participation and for the sustenance of deaf’s linguistic human rights.

In India, the deaf population is 14 million which accounts to 1.4% of the total population (Vasishta 2001). With a greater involvement of Deaf communities across the world, Indian Deaf community has pursued research on and propagation of Indian Sign Language and the use of it as a medium of deaf education. In the same spirit, in the contemporary academic scenario, increasing numbers of sign language researchers are seeking to create large corpora of sign language digital video data for which projects have begun in Australia, Ireland, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and Germany, and more are underway or being planned in other parts of the world. 

One such effort in Asia is undertaken by the Linguistic Data Consortium for Indian Languages, Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore. It plans to create quality, annotated sign (and text) data of Indian Sign Language, a language primarily used by the Indian Deaf community, and to develop a computational grammar of Indian Sign Language, which in turn, can form a basis of various aspects of Natural Language Processing. However, for such a pioneering work, linguistic, methodological and technical considerations are of crucial importance. Similarly, involvement, participation and commitment of academicians and technicians, Deaf activists and researchers, Deaf people and Deaf community, institutions and organisations is imperative to achieve such a grand objective.

In view of the above commitment towards Indian Sign Language and Indian Deaf community, the Linguistic Data Consortium for Indian Languages, as an initial step, plans to organise a workshop to address the linguistic, methodological and technical issues and challenges as well as to share and explore innovative developments in the field of sign language corpus development. Researchers, Deaf experts and activists and other related professionals are invited with an aim to provide an academic space to share and assess new methodologies, the latest information, tools and techniques,  theories and technology regarding sign language in the spirit of promoting the discipline as a consolidated research area, and its wider application.

The theme of the workshop is “Sign Language Corpus Development: Academic and Technical Issues” scheduled from 30 August to 2 September, 2010 at CIIL, Mysore. The Consortium wishes to invite the following experts to address the issues mentioned above:

Kindly give wide circulation to this announcement.
Detailed information about the workshop can be found at:
www.ldcil.org/announcementSLCD.aspx

Confirmations, opinions, comments and suggestions are welcomed at: