The Italian Sign Language Sign Bank: Using WordNet for Sign Language corpus creation

Sign languages are visual-gestural languages used by deaf people to communicate with others. As with spoken languages, Sign languages vary among countries and have their own vocabulary and grammar. Since they suffer of an extreme variability within the same country as they don't have a standard lexicon. This paper describes a LIS Sign Bank, a large scale LIS lexicon automatically linked to Word Net, that allows a rich extension with meanings. The development of large parallel corpus between Italian and Italian Sign Language (Lingua Italiana dei Segni, LIS) is described.