Expanded Auslan Corpus (Lite)

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 annotated in ELAN and makes selected corpus data available by an intuitive interface for the first time.

The Expanded Auslan Corpus (Lite) is available for access by the Deaf community and  general public 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 (Lite) seeks to create a societal benefit and impact through:

• Providing examples of Auslan in use that can be used for teaching and self-study  for students learning Auslan;
• Provide 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.

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 (Lite) is provided under license from Monash University with the contribution of Macquarie University . Their support and collaboration are greatly appreciated.

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.