Abstract
Signed languages are fascinating. They are visual-gestural, they are three-dimensional, and they have multiple simultaneous channels of production (left hand, right hand, face, mouth, posture…). They show us that natural languages are not limited to speech and writing. When it comes to addressing them computationally, we have barely scratched the surface.
In my talk I will give an introduction to the current state of computational sign linguistics. What language technologies for sign languages look like and the challenges they face. What goes into creating sign language datasets. Why deaf involvement is so essential and what happens when it is missing. And why German Sign Language has sixteen signs for the month of May.

 

Bio
Marc Schulder is a research associate at the Institute of German Sign Language and Communication of the Deaf (IDGS) at the University of Hamburg. His research interests centre on the creation of resources and technologies for signed languages that will aid deaf communities and sign linguistics research. After completing his PhD in computational linguistics in 2019, he joined IDGS to work in the DGS-Korpus project (2009–2027), home of the largest corpus of natural dialogues in German Sign Language (DGS). He is also currently part of the EU project VISTA-SL (2025–2027), an education platform for hearing and deaf second language learners, and supports the Priority Program ViCom (2022–2028) as open data consultant. Previously he was also involved with the EU project EASIER (2021–2023) on machine translation between European signed and spoken languages, and collaborated with the GeSi project (2023–2025) to investigate head nods in signed and spoken languages. Marc is hearing and an L2 learner of DGS.