Signbank is the authoritative dictionary of Auslan, Australian Sign Language. It was developed by Prof Trevor Johnston at Macquarie University, who also developed the Auslan Corpus—a collection of linguistically annotated video recordings of deaf signers of Auslan who are interviewed, tell stories, describe visual stimuli, and engage in free conversation.

Monash University has recently taken custody of Signbank and the Auslan Corpus and is implementing a significant modernisation project. This will involve modernising the code base and linking the two resources, so that examples from the corpus can be viewed when looking up a sign in Signbank, and users can easily view the dictionary entry for a sign when viewing material in the corpus. This project will also create and support infrastructure for researchers to self-deposit their own sign language corpora in future.

The technical upgrade is being funded by Monash University in partnership with the ARCD as part of the Language Data Commons of Australia HASS RDC project.

Additionally, the Victorian Deaf Education Institute has generously funded a Signbank expansion project that will see over 1000 new videos of signs added to Signbank over the next 12 months.

This research is part of the Sign Language @ Monash research cluster. To learn more about our other projects click here.