Expanded Auslan Corpus (Full)

Initially developed by Professor Trevor Johnston, the Auslan Corpus consists of 300 hours of digital videos that record 100 deaf native and near-native signers across Australia using Auslan in conversations.The Corpus has been updated almost annually since first written up in 2005.  The first version of the Auslan Corpus was deposited in 2008 at the Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR). The Expanded Auslan Corpus is a significant modernisation of this resource which greatly increases the amount of data annontated in ELAN.

The Expanded Auslan Corpus (Full) is available for access by researchers attached to a tertiary institution via the Language Data Commons of Australia (LDaCA) website, which seeks to make nationally significant language data available for academic and non-academic use.

Application & benefit

The Expanded Auslan Corpus (Full) seeks to create a societal benefit and impact through:

• Modernise this significant language data resource so as to enhance Australian social and cultural wellbeing, and help Australia understand and preserve its culture, history and heritage;
• Support the development of a resource to support the growing number of professionals who are  competent to work with the deaf community  and help address the extreme workforce shortage we see in this area;
• Create and secure a reference archive of Auslan due to language endangerment;
• Create the underlying research infrastructure to enable researchers to self-deposit sign language corpora that they hold, providing a one-stop home for preserving sign language corpora of the Indo-pacific region.

Authors

Associate Professor Louisa Willoughby
Linguistics & Applied Linguistics, Faculty of Arts, Monash University
louisa.willoughby@monash.edu

Publications

An extensive list of publications have appeared from this resource. 
For a summary and more information about the technical specifcations of the Corpus see https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07268602.2024.2380672 (open access)

Questions?

The Expanded Auslan Corpus (Full) is provided under license from Monash University with the contribution of Macquarie University and may only be used in accordance with the provisions of the agreement.

If you have any questions about the licensing of this innovation email innovation@monash.edu.

Access may be requested via Language Data Commons of Australia (LDaCA) website.