Overview of ASL Resources
The American Sign Language Linguistic Research Project (ASLLRP) provides Internet access to high-quality ASL video data, generally including front and side views and a close-up of the face. The manual and non-manual components of the signing have been linguistically annotated using SignStream® (software to facilitate linguistic annotation and analysis of visual language data). The recently expanded video corpora can be browsed and searched through the Data Access Interface (DAI 2) we have designed; it is possible to carry out complex searches. The data from our corpora can also be downloaded; annotations are available in an XML export format. We have also developed the ASLLRP ASL Sign Bank, with a total of over 45,200 examples, including citation-form signs and signs contained in ASL sentences (see statistics). These data have been used for many types of research in linguistics and in computer-based sign language recognition from video. Links to these resources are provided below.
NEW - Summer of 2024: We now have the first AI-based system for enabling users to look up ASL signs directly from video input. This is available (free of charge) on the Web as part of our ASL Sign Bank: users can upload self-standing ASL sign videos, and the system will provide the 5 most likely matches (in decreasing order of likelihood). Upon confirmation of the desired sign, the user will be taken to the entry for the sign in our Sign Bank. This new functionality is also incorporated into our software for linguistic annotation of ASL videos, SignStream® (distributed at no cost), to allow the annotator to look up individual signs as the videos are being annotated.
For further details, see:
- Neidle, C., A. Opoku, & D. Metaxas (2022) "ASL Video Corpora & Sign Bank: Resources Available through the American Sign Language Linguistic Research Project (ASLLRP)" https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.07899
- Neidle, C., A. Opoku, C. Ballard, Y. Zhou, X. He, G. Dimitriadis & D. Metaxas (2024) "New Capability to Look Up an ASL Sign from a Video Example" https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.13571
Latest announcement on Facebook (August 2024):
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/Hv8Y1e4W97hZXzie/
ASL Sign Bank
Data Access Interface (DAI): Continuous Signing Data
SignStream®: Mac Software for Linguistic Annotation of ASL Data
https://www.bu.edu/asllrp/SignStream/3/
Other Information about the ASLLRP
Personnel
Documentation: