Building ASLNet, a Wordnet for American Sign Language
We discuss the creation of ASLNet by aligning the Princeton WordNet (PWN) with SignStudy, an online database of American Sign Language (ASL) signs. This alignment will have many immediate benefits for first and second-sign language learners as well as ASL researchers by highlighting semantic relations among signs. We begin to address the interesting theoretical question of to what extent the wordnet-style organization of the English lexicon (and those of wordnets in other spoken languages) is applicable to ASL, and whether ASL requires positing additional, language or modality-specific relations among signs. Significantly, the mapping of SignStudy and PWN provides a bridge between ASL and the worldwide wordnet community, which comprises speakers of dozens of languages working in academic and language technology settings.
PDF Abstract
ImageNet
