--- title: "A Computational Construction Grammar Framework for Modelling Signed Languages — Vos 2025" description: "The paper addresses the gap between theoretical constructional descriptions of sign languages and their formalization… 2 references, cited by 1 paper here." authors: ["Liesbet De Vos", "Paul Van Eecke", "Katrien Beuls"] year: 2025 venue: "Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Construction Grammars and NLP" source: "https://aclanthology.org/2025.cxgsnlp-1.1/" licence: "CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)" licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License" canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/vos-2025-computational-construction-grammar-framework-modelling/" --- [Elamur Research](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/vos-2025-computational-construction-grammar-framework-modelling/) [home](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [papers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/) / [2025](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2025/page/3/) / A Computational Construction Grammar Framework for Modelling Signed Languages # A Computational Construction Grammar Framework for Modelling Signed Languages **Authors:** Liesbet De Vos, [Paul Van Eecke](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/paul-van-eecke/) and [Katrien Beuls](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/katrien-beuls/) · **Year:** 2025 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Construction Grammars and NLP · **Licence:** [CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) **Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/2025.cxgsnlp-1.1/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/2025.cxgsnlp-1.1.pdf) **Citations:** 1 in our library, of the 140,884 papers whose bibliographies we read ## Summary The paper addresses the gap between theoretical constructional descriptions of sign languages and their formalization and computational implementation. Existing computational models based on HPSG, RRG or AZee rules mostly only generate signs for an animated avatar and hardly analyze the meaning of utterances. The authors developed basic mechanisms for bidirectional processing of manual signs in Fluid Construction Grammar (FCG), that is, both comprehension and production. They encode each individual sign phonetically using the HamNoSys notation. It is not tied to any particular language and captures handshape, orientation, location and movement. Signs in a stream can overlap in time, so for their synchronization a multilinear representation is proposed, which is built from ELAN annotations. All of this is packaged as a module of the Babel library and showcased in an interactive web demonstration using an utterance in French Belgian Sign Language (LSFB). The paper contains no quantitative evaluation. The value of the work lies in providing a foundation on which hypotheses about sign language constructions can be formalized and tested on corpora. ## Key points - **Resource:** an FCG module for sign languages as part of the Babel library (download via emergent-languages.org) and a web demo at liesbet-devos.github.io/SL-processing-demo with real-time visualization of construction application. - **Three requirements for the framework:** a phonetic representation of manual signs (HamNoSys), explicit temporal relations between signs (extracted from ELAN files) and bidirectional processing. Non-manual components (facial expressions, head and shoulder movements) are not yet taken into account and are left for future work. - **Example constructions in the demo:** HAUT-CXN is a specific sign meaning "high" (right hand, index finger pointing up, slight upward movement). THEME-QUESTION-CXN captures the order in LSFB questions, where the theme precedes the interrogative part, and this order is enforced by an adjacency constraint. In comprehension mode, the goal state in the search tree is reached at node 17. - **Context of prior work:** van Trijp's (2015) proof-of-concept implementation in FCG covered only two LSF constructions. The HPSG grammar of the ViSiCAST/eSIGN projects for BSL contains 50 lexical and 9 grammatical rules. AZee rules for LSF cover 94% of a medium-sized corpus. *Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.* Fields: [Linguistics & languages](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/linguistics/) ## Cite Cite as: Liesbet De Vos, Paul Van Eecke and Katrien Beuls. 2025. A Computational Construction Grammar Framework for Modelling Signed Languages. Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Construction Grammars and NLP. The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. ```bibtex @inproceedings{vos2025computational, title = {{A Computational Construction Grammar Framework for Modelling Signed Languages}}, author = {Liesbet {De Vos}, Paul {Van Eecke} and Katrien Beuls}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Construction Grammars and NLP}, year = {2025}, url = {https://aclanthology.org/2025.cxgsnlp-1.1/} } ``` - [← previous A Comparative Benchmark of a Moroccan Darija Toxicity Detection Model (Typica.ai) and Major LLM-Based Moderation APIs (OpenAI, Mistral, Anthropic)](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/assoudi-2025-comparative-benchmark-moroccan-darija-toxicity/) - [next → A Derivational ChainBank for Modern Standard Arabic](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/marzouk-2025-derivational-chainbank-modern-standard-arabic/) - [↑ back to papers of 2025](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2025/page/3/) ## References 2 references, 1 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet. 1. developed mechanisms into the FCG framework. The implemented mechanisms are available as a module within the Babel software library, which is openly available. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=developed+mechanisms+into+the+FCG+framework%2E+The+implemented+mechanisms+are+available+as+a+module+within+the+Babel+software+library%2C+which+is+openly+available%2E) 2. Laura Banarescu, Claire Bonial, Shu Cai, Madalina Georgescu, Kira Griffitt, Ulf Hermjakob, Kevin Knight, Philipp Koehn, Martha Palmer, and Nathan Schneider. 2013. Abstract meaning representation for sembanking. In Proceedings of the 7th Linguistic Annotation Workshop and Interoperability with Discou… [our card](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/banarescu-2013-abstract-meaning-representation-sembanking/)