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The Construction of the CORALSE Corpus, Now and Beyond: A Tool for Documenting Spanish Sign Language

Paper · 2026 · Ana Fernández Soneira, María C. Bao-Fente, Rayco H. González-Montesino et al.

Summary

The paper describes CORALSE, the earliest reference corpus compiled for Spanish Sign Language (LSE). It covers how the corpus was built and what it takes to document a sign language thoroughly.

  • Phase 1 (2013–2016): The team designed seven signed tasks, including questionnaires in LSE, map and story narration, free conversation and picture naming. They then filmed 81 deaf informants in pairs across seven Spanish regions, using a multi-camera, chroma-key setup with a deaf moderator present.
  • Phase 2 (2018–2021): They added more regional and diachronic data, interpreted the questionnaires into Spanish to study attitudes and variation, and analysed the naming task, starting with colours and numbers. Annotation in ELAN is now underway.
  • Phase 3 (from 2023): The TR3/CORALSE project widens the corpus with three subcorpora. These cover formal registers of reference signers, child bilingual acquisition (AdCORALSE), and parallel translations and interpretations of specialised language.

The authors present CORALSE as an open, FAIR-compliant heritage archive for linguists, interpreters, educators and computational researchers.

Key points

  • Informant sample: 81 deaf informants (38 men, 43 women) in three age groups (18–35, 35–65, over 65). They come from Galicia, the Basque Country, Madrid, Andalusia, the Canary Islands, Valencia and Extremadura. Recorded material totals about 49 hours 44 minutes.
  • Elicitation design: seven tasks, combining structured questionnaires with tasks targeting specific forms such as classifiers and time markers. The naming task uses 130 images.
  • ELAN annotation scheme: for each informant, one translation tier, two gloss tiers (dominant and non-dominant hand) and one comment tier.
  • Reference-signer subcorpus: the Galician subset (CORALSE_GA, 16 participants) was used to identify reference signers. The goal is 20–30 such signers across Spain.
  • Funding: the Spanish Ministry of Science funds the third phase through three subprojects: RefCORALSE, AdCORALSE and CoMPARTIR (PID2022-139084).

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

🎓Universidade da CoruñaA Coruña · Spain14 works · 328 citations🎓Universidade de VigoVigo · Spain5 works · 12 citations🎓Universidad Rey Juan CarlosMadrid · Spain4 works · 4 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 17,450 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 17,296 worksPsychology · 1,649 worksDevelopmental and Educational Psychology · 523 works

Cite

Cite as Ana Fernández Soneira, María C. Bao-Fente, Rayco H. González-Montesino and Inmaculada C. Báez-Montero. 2026. The Construction of the CORALSE Corpus, Now and Beyond: A Tool for Documenting Spanish Sign Language. 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 10.63317/5aiop98n7wa4

@inproceedings{soneira2026construction,
  title = {{The Construction of the CORALSE Corpus, Now and Beyond: A Tool for Documenting Spanish Sign Language}},
  author = {Ana Fernández Soneira, María C. Bao-Fente, Rayco H. González-Montesino and Inmaculada C. Báez-Montero},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the LREC 2026 12th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Language in Motion},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.63317/5aiop98n7wa4},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/5aiop98n7wa4}
}

References

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