„Multilevel linguistic annotation of Polish Sign Language (PJM)” – project funded by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education as a part of the National Programme for Human Sciences Development.

The main objective of the project is to create a detailed and multilevel annotation of signed data within PJM corpus. The corpus of sign language is the repository of knowledge covering not only PJM’s grammar and lexis but also the life and culture of Polish Deaf. The annotation is indispensable in order to fully derive from the potential of the corpus.

As a part of the project the following actions are planned:
1. further collection of video recordings;

2. segmentation, glossing, and lemmatization of new material;

3. multilevel annotation (including HamNoSys notation transcription, sentence segmentation, translation into Polish, and basic grammatical interpretation).

The task of multilevel annotation of the corpus is a pioneer work in Poland thus foreign experts’ support is very important. The role of a consultant and an external adviser to the project has been assigned to professor Trevor Johnston from Australia, one of the leading specialist in world sign languages and the professor at the Linguistic Department of Macquarie University in Sydney.

The realisation of the project will result in the comprehensive collection of video recordings which present the discourses of native PJM users. It will comprise one of the world’s biggest annotated repositories of this type. It will take the final form of data base adjusted for browsing and modification of the gathered information via iLex. The programme enables unlimited tagging of the video material sequences.