Building a Treebank in Universal Dependencies for Italian Sign Language

Abstract

The Italian Sign Language (LIS) is the natural language used by the Italian Deaf community. This paper discusses the application of the Universal Dependencies (UD) format to the syntactic annotation of a LIS corpus. This investigation aims in particular at contributing to sign language research by addressing the challenges that the visual-manual modality of LIS creates generally in linguistic annotation and specifically in segmentation and syntactic analysis. We addressed two case studies from the storytelling domain first segmented on the ELAN platform, and second syntactically annotated using CoNLLU format.