Making Sign Language Research Findable: The sign-lang@ LREC A nthology and the S ign L anguage D ataset C ompendium (2025)

Abstract: Resources and research on sign languages are sparse and can often be difficult to locate. Few centralised sources of information exist. This article presents two repositories that aim to improve the findability of such information through the implementation of open science best practices. The sign-lang@LREC Anthology is a repository of publications on sign languages in the series of sign-lang@LREC workshops and related events, enhanced with indices cataloguing what datasets, tools, languages and projects are addressed by these publications. The Sign Language Dataset Compendium provides an overview of existing linguistic corpora, lexical resources and data collection tasks. We describe the evolution of these repositories, covering topics such as supplementary information structures, rich metadata, interoperability, and dealing with the challenges of reference rot.

## introduction sign language linguistics is both a small and young field, compared to research on spoken languages. this is especially true for areas such as computational and corpus sign linguistics, which only became feasible with the advent of high-quality digital media, as signs require video imagery to be represented suitably. in recent decades, these areas of research have grown markedly, as has the number of digital sign language resources, such as corpora and lexica. nevertheless, data availability for individual sign languages continues to range from sparse to virtually non-existent @xcite . finding these precious resources or the research relating to them can often require extensive web searches or literature review in several languages, as few centralised sources of information exist. in this article we present two repositories we created to support sign language researchers in their work by compiling metadata-rich collections of sign language research articles and datasets. the sign-lang@lrec anthology foot_0 is the openaccess publication repository of the workshop series on the representation and processing of sign languages (see fig. 1 ). to date the anthology covers 485 articles: 370 sign-lang workshop papers and an additional 115 papers from co-located events. apart from bibliographic metadata, each article is enhanced with information on the languages, datasets, tools, and project affiliations central to it, allowing researchers a more focussed search for relevant literature. while the anthology was released in 2020, this is the first article to describe it. the sign language dataset compendium foot_1 is a structured overview of existing linguistic resources on sign languages (see fig. 2 ). it covers 43 corpora and 86 lexical resources across 82 sign languages, as well as 28 data collection tasks commonly used in the described corpora. since its introduction in @xcite it has received several updates. apart from the addition of 25 new entries (including resources for 10 more sign languages) and the maintenance of existing materials, various features were added and improved, which we will describe in this article. both repositories embrace fair principles @xcite by exposing rich metadata about themselves and the resources they document, building on open standards and providing stable identifiers wherever possible. at the same time they have to deal with the challenges of reference rot @xcite as external references change, move, and disappear. the article is structured as follows: section 2 provides relevant background information on sign language research (section 2.1) and existing repositories (section 2.2). section 3 provides general introductions to the sign-lang@lrec anthology (section 3.1) and sign language dataset compendium (section 3.2). section 4 highlights various aspects of interoperability, such as the rich metadata provided by the repositories (section 4.1), how we connect to different resources (section 4.2), our shared inventory of language metadata (section 4.3), and other synergies in workflows and data structures (section 4.4). in section 5 we address the threat of reference rot by leveraging semi-automated availability checks, archival copies and robust links. in the remaining sections we provide discussions of the impact that our repositories have had to date (section 6), their limitations (section 7) and offer concluding words (section 8). ## interoperability the goals of both the anthology and compendium are to make information more easily findable and provide a net benefit to the research community. to this end we build on establishing connections at various levels, be it between entries or between repositories, by referencing external sources, exposing our information for processing, or by sharing data and code across resources. ## fighting reference rot a major concern in maintaining our repositories is that of reference rot @xcite . this covers the related issues of link rot, where a link no longer leads to the resource it once referenced, and content drift, where content evolved to such an extent that it no longer contains the referenced information. for the repositories themselves, we stave off link rot by following fair principles. each repository is assigned a doi as a persistent identifier, urls are kept as stable as possible and retired urls are assigned redirects. the compendium is also produced as a monolithic pdf document, each release of which is archived in a fair repository. dealing with reference rot of external links is a more challenging issue, and one that we have encountered regularly, especially in our work on the compendium. cases we have encountered included a) custom web domains not being renewed after the end of a project, b) content moving to new uris without redirect due to website redesigns or changes to content management software, c) information (especially descriptions of completed projects) being moved, abbreviated or deleted entirely, d) dynamically generated websites failing due to broken server backends, e) content becoming inaccessible due to external changes, such as browsers or operating systems ceasing support for specific file formats and software types. as our repositories are living resources, we can address some of these issues by finding new or alternative locations for the information or data in question. in other cases, the original information is lost and we must turn to web archives for help. in either case, we must first become aware that the status of a reference has changed. we also need to serve users with ways to triage issues that arise between releases. these matters we address in the following sections. ## impact both the anthology and compendium are metaresources whose main purpose is to guide users to other resources, a task that is rarely credited explicitly. as such, their exact impact can be difficult to judge, especially for the anthology, which until now had no associated publications that could be cited. at least one study, @xcite , explicitly names both our resources as the basis for their own survey. aonuki and hall (2024) recommend the compendium to lecturers of linguistics classes seeking to include a diversity of sign languages in their materials. a look at the citations of @xcite and @xcite reveals additional uses for the compendium: most frequent is its use as a survey paper, serving as a shorthand in discussions of related work. other publications use the compendium's dataset inventory and its information on dataset sizes and creation periods to support observations regarding the scarcity of sign language datasets, the recent increase in number of datasets, and for size comparisons between datasets. ## limitations 7.1 scope there are certain limitations to the thematic scope of the resources described in our repositories. the anthology is naturally limited to only catalogue content referenced by its publications. the curation criteria of the compendium were designed to ensure a focus on resources relevant to linguistic research on language use as exhibited by signers for whom it is their language of daily life. as such it does not cover corpora that focus on script-based language production, translated or interpreted content, or on language learners and language acquisition. this focus was also relevant for developing a consistent entry format, as the information needs in domains like machine translation or language acquisition differ noticeably from those of general sign linguistics. to assist researchers seeking materials that fall outside the scope of our collection, we provide an overview of other relevant sources of information. another limitation of scope is that we are unable to perform extensive quality control on the resources listed by our repositories. both anthology and compendium are designed to help find potentially relevant resources, but it remains the reader's responsibility to verify that the methodological and ethical criteria of a resource make it suitable for their specific work. ## conclusion we have presented our work on the creation, maintenance, and ongoing development of two repositories of sign language research data. the signlang@lrec anthology is a workshop series repository of sign language publications. the sign language dataset compendium is a curated metadata repository, documenting linguistic corpora, lexica and data collection tasks. both repositories are open and fair resources with rich metadata, designed to aid researchers in finding relevant works on sign languages. different indexes group contents by language, resource type or authorship to help users focus their search. a wealth of links connects to external sources and other repositories. we also address the risks of reference rot through a semi-automatic workflow that combines link availability checks, web archiving and robust links to harden our efforts against information loss. the anthology and the compendium are living resources that are regularly updated. should you be aware of additional relevant resources, know of information that is missing from an entry or that has changed, have spotted inaccuracies, or wish to provide us with any other feedback, please contact the anthology team at anthology@dgs-korpus.de or the compendium team at sldc@dgs-korpus.de.