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home / papers / 2026 / GeoQuery-LSFB: A French Belgian Sign Language Corpus with Procedural Semantic Annotations

GeoQuery-LSFB: A French Belgian Sign Language Corpus with Procedural Semantic Annotations

Paper · 2026 · Liesbet De Vos, Laurence Meurant, Paul Van Eecke et al.

Summary

Procedural semantics treats the meaning of an utterance as a compositional program that a machine can execute against a world model, such as a database. Corpora annotated this way exist for English and a modest set of other spoken languages, mostly as translations of the GeoQuery geography question benchmark. No signed language had such a resource. The authors address this gap by adding French Belgian Sign Language (LSFB) to the multilingual GeoQuery corpus. A native LSFB signer was filmed producing an equivalent of each query. Every recording received two annotation layers: French ID-glosses and a phonetic transcription in a time-aligned, multilinear extension of HamNoSys. Alongside the 250-utterance parallel core, the authors provide an augmented version for data-intensive learning methods. The result is the first resource linking sign language expressions to procedural meaning representations. It opens semantic parsing and grounded question answering research to signed input and adds to the limited LSFB data. It also allows meaning-first comparison of how one sign language and many spoken languages encode the same content.

Key points

  • Size: GeoQuery-LSFB has a 250-utterance core aligned with the original GeoQuery annotations, plus an augmented set of 4519 utterances.
  • Annotation: Recordings of a native signer were annotated with French ID-glosses (following Johnston) and transcribed phonetically in a time-aligned, multilinear HamNoSys format.
  • Multilingual context: The corpus joins existing GeoQuery translations in German, Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, Turkish, Greek, Thai, Indonesian, Swedish and Farsi.
  • LSFB background: LSFB has an estimated 20,000 users, about 4,600 of them first-language signers, and gained official status in 2003. The main prior resource is the 90-hour LSFB Corpus, of which 25 hours are glossed; it was released for machine learning as LSFB-CONT and LSFB-ISOL.
  • Availability: The corpus is released under GNU GPL 2.0 on Zenodo (doi:10.5281/zenodo.19220833).

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

🎓Vrije Universiteit BrusselBrussels · Belgium12 works · 737 citations🎓University of NamurNamur · Belgium6 works · 21 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 7The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 16,667 worksArtificial Intelligence · 16,194 worksArts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 worksPsychology · 1,552 worksDevelopmental and Educational Psychology · 499 worksHuman-Computer Interaction · 141 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.French · 70 works

Cite

Cite as Liesbet De Vos, Laurence Meurant, Paul Van Eecke and Katrien Beuls. 2026. GeoQuery-LSFB: A French Belgian Sign Language Corpus with Procedural Semantic Annotations. 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 10.63317/3beia2n27dp3

@inproceedings{vos2026geoquery,
  title = {{GeoQuery-LSFB: A French Belgian Sign Language Corpus with Procedural Semantic Annotations}},
  author = {Liesbet {De Vos}, Laurence Meurant, Paul {Van Eecke} and Katrien Beuls},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the LREC 2026 12th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Language in Motion},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.63317/3beia2n27dp3},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/3beia2n27dp3}
}

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