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The SignBeach Dataset of Dutch Sign Language (NGT) signs

Paper · 2026 · Annika Schiefner, Gomèr Otterspeer, Beyza Sümer et al.

Summary

Few lexical video resources for Dutch Sign Language (NGT) suit children. Existing ones also tend to omit the mouthings and other non-manual cues that signs carry in real use. The authors address this with SignBeach, a database of 1401 everyday NGT signs. It was built for online games in which primary school children translate between NGT signs and Dutch words. Items came from a children's sign book, were checked against an online NGT dictionary, and were then matched to entries in the NGT Signbank. When a variant was missing or disputed, the team substituted or re-recorded it based on the signers' feedback. Each sign was filmed with four deaf signers in a studio using five synchronised cameras, managed through the signCollect pipeline. The release adds pose, hand and 3D body estimates and links each item to Signbank via glosses, IDs and URLs. The resource is useful for psycholinguistic research, for sign language technology, and as a link to other NGT resources.

Key points

  • 1401 lexical signs, each performed by four deaf professional signers (two women, two men) and filmed from five synchronised camera angles.
  • The signs map to 1297 distinct Signbank glosses. Because one manual form can carry several meanings, items are identified by their Dutch translation. Most compounds have no Signbank entry and are marked NA.
  • Computational derivatives: MediaPipe keypoints, HaMeR hand estimates, and SAM 3D Body full-body 3D reconstructions.
  • Item selection started from the book "Mijn eerste 1500 gebaren" (Nederlands Gebarencentrum, 2012), and recordings were made with the signCollect platform.
  • Released on Figshare under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license, for non-commercial reuse only.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓University of AmsterdamAmsterdam · Netherlands151 works · 174,506 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 5The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 18,614 worksComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition · 3,486 worksPsychology · 1,649 worksDevelopmental and Educational Psychology · 523 worksHuman-Computer Interaction · 160 works

Cite

Cite as Annika Schiefner, Gomèr Otterspeer, Beyza Sümer and Floris Roelofsen. 2026. The SignBeach Dataset of Dutch Sign Language (NGT) signs. Proceedings of the LREC 2026 12th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Language in Motion.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.63317/2whuhuqvwuix

@inproceedings{schiefner2026signbeach,
  title = {{The SignBeach Dataset of Dutch Sign Language (NGT) signs}},
  author = {Annika Schiefner, Gomèr Otterspeer, Beyza Sümer and Floris Roelofsen},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the LREC 2026 12th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Language in Motion},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.63317/2whuhuqvwuix},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/2whuhuqvwuix}
}

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