Floris Roelofsen


2024

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Evaluating Inter-Annotator Agreement for Non-Manual Markers in Sign Languages
Lyke D. Esselink | Marloes Oomen | Floris Roelofsen
Proceedings of the LREC-COLING 2024 11th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Evaluation of Sign Language Resources

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An Extension of the NGT Dataset in Global Signbank
Ulrika Klomp | Lisa Gierman | Pieter Manders | Ellen Nauta | Gomèr Otterspeer | Ray Pelupessy | Galya Stern | Dalene Venter | Casper Wubbolts | Marloes Oomen | Floris Roelofsen
Proceedings of the LREC-COLING 2024 11th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Evaluation of Sign Language Resources

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SignCollect: A ‘Touchless’ Pipeline for Constructing Large-scale Sign Language Repositories
Gomèr Otterspeer | Ulrika Klomp | Floris Roelofsen
Proceedings of the LREC-COLING 2024 11th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Evaluation of Sign Language Resources

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3D-LEX v1.0 – 3D Lexicons for American Sign Language and Sign Language of the Netherlands
Oline Ranum | Gomèr Otterspeer | Jari I. Andersen | Robert G. Belleman | Floris Roelofsen
Proceedings of the LREC-COLING 2024 11th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Evaluation of Sign Language Resources

2023

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Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Automatic Translation for Signed and Spoken Languages
Dimitar Shterionov | Mirella De Sisto | Mathias Muller | Davy Van Landuyt | Rehana Omardeen | Shaun Oboyle | Annelies Braffort | Floris Roelofsen | Fred Blain | Bram Vanroy | Eleftherios Avramidis
Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Automatic Translation for Signed and Spoken Languages

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Analyzing the Potential of Linguistic Features for Sign Spotting: A Look at Approximative Features
Natalie Hollain | Martha Larson | Floris Roelofsen
Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Automatic Translation for Signed and Spoken Languages

Sign language processing is the field of research that aims to recognize, retrieve, and spot signs in videos. Various approaches have been developed, varying in whether they use linguistic features and whether they use landmark detection tools or not. Incorporating linguistics holds promise for improving sign language processing in terms of performance, generalizability, and explainability. This paper focuses on the task of sign spotting and aims to expand on the approximative linguistic features that have been used in previous work, and to understand when linguistic features deliver an improvement over landmark features. We detect landmarks with Mediapipe and extract linguistically relevant features from them, including handshape, orientation, location, and movement. We compare a sign spotting model using linguistic features with a model operating on landmarks directly, finding that the approximate linguistic features tested in this paper capture some aspects of signs better than the landmark features, while they are worse for others.

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Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Inquisitiveness Below and Beyond the Sentence Boundary
Valentin D. Richard | Floris Roelofsen
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Inquisitiveness Below and Beyond the Sentence Boundary

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The indefinite-interrogative affinity in sign languages: the case of Catalan Sign Language
Raquel Veiga Busto | Floris Roelofsen | Alexandra Navarrete González
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Inquisitiveness Below and Beyond the Sentence Boundary

Prior studies on spoken languages have shown that indefinite and interrogative pronouns may be formally very similar. Our research aims to understand if sign languages exhibit this type of affinity. This paper presents an overview of the phenomenon and reports on the results of two studies: a cross-linguistic survey based on a sample of 30 sign languages and an empirical investigation conducted with three deaf consultants of Catalan Sign Language (LSC). Our research shows that, in sign languages, certain signs have both existential and interrogative readings and it identifies the environments that make existential interpretations available in LSC.

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A Crosslinguistic Database for Combinatorial and Semantic Properties of Attitude Predicates
Deniz Özyıldız | Ciyang Qing | Floris Roelofsen | Maribel Romero | Wataru Uegaki
Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Research in Computational Linguistic Typology and Multilingual NLP

We introduce a cross-linguistic database for attitude predicates, which references their combinatorial (syntactic) and semantic properties. Our data allows assessment of cross-linguistic generalizations about attitude predicates as well as discovery of new typological/cross-linguistic patterns. This paper motivates empirical and theoretical issues that our database will help to address, the sample predicates and the properties that it references, as well as our design and methodological choices. Two case studies illustrate how the database can be used to assess validity of cross-linguistic generalizations.

2022

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First Steps Towards a Signing Avatar for Railway Travel Announcements in the Netherlands
Britt Van Gemert | Richard Cokart | Lyke Esselink | Maartje De Meulder | Nienke Sijm | Floris Roelofsen
Proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Sign Language Translation and Avatar Technology: The Junction of the Visual and the Textual: Challenges and Perspectives

This paper presents first steps towards a sign language avatar for communicating railway travel announcements in Dutch Sign Language. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, it demonstrates effective ways to employ co-design and focus group methods in the context of developing sign language technology, and presents several concrete findings and results obtained through co-design and focus group sessions which have not only led to improvements of our own prototype but may also inform the development of signing avatars for other languages and in other application domains.

2021

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Online Evaluation of Text-to-sign Translation by Deaf End Users: Some Methodological Recommendations (short paper)
Floris Roelofsen | Lyke Esselink | Shani Mende-Gillings | Maartje de Meulder | Nienke Sijm | Anika Smeijers
Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Automatic Translation for Signed and Spoken Languages (AT4SSL)

We present a number of methodological recommendations concerning the online evaluation of avatars for text-to-sign translation, focusing on the structure, format and length of the questionnaire, as well as methods for eliciting and faithfully transcribing responses

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Sign Language Translation in a Healthcare Setting
Floris Roelofsen | Lyke Esselink | Shani Mende-Gillings | Anika Smeijers
Proceedings of the Translation and Interpreting Technology Online Conference

Communication between healthcare professionals and deaf patients is challenging, and the current COVID-19 pandemic makes this issue even more acute. Sign language interpreters can often not enter hospitals and face masks make lipreading impossible. To address this urgent problem, we developed a system which allows healthcare professionals to translate sentences that are frequently used in the diagnosis and treatment of COVID-19 into Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT). Translations are displayed by means of videos and avatar animations. The architecture of the system is such that it could be extended to other applications and other sign languages in a relatively straightforward way.