Signbank Version 2 (V2)

Auslan Signbank is a language resources site for Auslan (Australian Sign Language) and the authoritative Auslan dictionary. Auslan is the language of the Deaf community in Australia. Initially developed as a paper dictionary by  Professor Trevor Johnston in the 1980s Signbank is accessed by over 2,500 users every day.  Signbank V2  is a significant modernization of Signbank including optimization for mobile, completely redesigning the user interface to add functionality and adding over 600 new signs and variantes to the dictionary.

Users of Signbank include Deaf people, Deaf students, sign language interpreters, students of Auslan, or parents of Deaf children who use Signbank to help break down many of the barriers that people with disabilities face at school, university, work and in the social sphere.

Signbank V2 is available for access by the deaf community and  general public via the website.

Application & benefit

Signbank V2 seeks to create a societal benefit and impact through:

• Making it easy for the Deaf community and members of the general public to access an extensive dictionary of Auslan signs, thereby facilitating users to learn and understand the language and help break down many of the barriers that people with disabilities face at school, university, work and in the social sphere;
• Provide a valuable 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;
• Providing an underlying open-source code base that can be used by other communities to create their own sign language dictionaries

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?

Signbank V2 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 is via an external website where you will need to agree to the terms and conditions.