A Process to Develop Sign Language Corpus using Crowdsourcing

Abstract

Humans use language in order to communicate between one another. There exist a number of languages which are either spoken or written. Among these languages, there exists a special type of language called Sign Language (SL). Sign language is a general term which includes any kind of gestural language that makes use of signs and gestures to convey message. Although the deaf community feels comfortable while using Sign Language as their mode of communication, but they face a lot of problems as well. Therefore, in order to help and assist the deaf community a repository of different sign languages are essential for each sign language. This work presents a process to develop a repository by collecting and validating sign language gestures of any language by involving the deaf community and language experts. A small data collection based on a proof-of-concept application has also been presented in this work. Lastly, it highlights the benefits of such corpus by discussing possible applications that can be built to serve the deaf community of the world at large.