Modelling a parallel corpus of French and French Belgian Sign Language (LSFB)

The overarching objective underlying this research is to develop an online tool, based on a parallel corpus of French Belgian Sign Language (LSFB) and written Belgian French. This tool is aimed to assist various set of tasks related to the comparison of LSFB and French, to the benefit of general users as well as teachers in bilingual schools, translators and interpreters, as well as linguists. These tasks include (1) the comprehension of LSFB or French texts, (2) the production of LSFB or French texts, (3) the translation between LSFB and French in both directions and (4) the contrastive analysis of these languages. The first step of investigation aims at creating an unidirectional French-LSFB concordancer, able to align a one- or multiple-word expression from the French translated text with its corresponding expressions in the videotaped LSFB productions. We aim at testing the efficiency of this concordancer for the extraction of a dictionary of meanings in context. In this paper, we will present the modelling of the different data sources at our disposal and specifically the way they interact with one another.