Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Phonetics and Phonology Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Computational Linguistics

Communication Sciences and Disorders Faculty Articles and Research

Publication Year

Articles 1 - 3 of 3

Full-Text Articles in Phonetics and Phonology

Improving Sign Recognition With Phonology, Lee Kezar, Jesse Thomason, Zed Sevcikova Sehyr May 2023

Improving Sign Recognition With Phonology, Lee Kezar, Jesse Thomason, Zed Sevcikova Sehyr

Communication Sciences and Disorders Faculty Articles and Research

We use insights from research on American Sign Language (ASL) phonology to train models for isolated sign language recognition (ISLR), a step towards automatic sign language understanding. Our key insight is to explicitly recognize the role of phonology in sign production to achieve more accurate ISLR than existing work which does not consider sign language phonology. We train ISLR models that take in pose estimations of a signer producing a single sign to predict not only the sign but additionally its phonological characteristics, such as the handshape. These auxiliary predictions lead to a nearly 9% absolute gain in sign recognition …


An Interactive Visual Database For American Sign Language Reveals How Signs Are Organized In The Mind, Zed Sevcikova Sehyr, Ariel Goldberg, Karen Emmory, Naomi Caselli Apr 2021

An Interactive Visual Database For American Sign Language Reveals How Signs Are Organized In The Mind, Zed Sevcikova Sehyr, Ariel Goldberg, Karen Emmory, Naomi Caselli

Communication Sciences and Disorders Faculty Articles and Research

"We are four researchers who study psycholinguistics, linguistics, neuroscience and deaf education. Our team of deaf and hearing scientists worked with a group of software engineers to create the ASL-LEX database that anyone can use for free. We cataloged information on nearly 3,000 signs and built a visual, searchable and interactive database that allows scientists and linguists to work with ASL in entirely new ways."


The Asl-Lex 2.0 Project: A Database Of Lexical And Phonological Properties For 2,723 Signs In American Sign Language, Zed Sevcikova Sehyr, Naomi Caselli, Ariel M. Cohen-Goldberg, Karen Emmory Feb 2021

The Asl-Lex 2.0 Project: A Database Of Lexical And Phonological Properties For 2,723 Signs In American Sign Language, Zed Sevcikova Sehyr, Naomi Caselli, Ariel M. Cohen-Goldberg, Karen Emmory

Communication Sciences and Disorders Faculty Articles and Research

ASL-LEX is a publicly available, large-scale lexical database for American Sign Language (ASL). We report on the expanded database (ASL-LEX 2.0) that contains 2,723 ASL signs. For each sign, ASL-LEX now includes a more detailed phonological description, phonological density and complexity measures, frequency ratings (from deaf signers), iconicity ratings (from hearing non-signers and deaf signers), transparency (“guessability”) ratings (from non-signers), sign and videoclip durations, lexical class, and more. We document the steps used to create ASL-LEX 2.0 and describe the distributional characteristics for sign properties across the lexicon and examine the relationships among lexical and phonological properties of signs. Correlation …