BeCoS Corpus: Belgian Covid-19 Sign Language Corpus. A Corpus for Training Sign Language Recognition and Translation

Abstract

We are presenting the Belgian Federal COVID-19 corpus, nicknamed the BeCoS (Belgian Covid Sign language) corpus. It consists of the entire archive of official press conferences from the Belgian Federal Government concerning the COVID-19 pandemic. The speakers speak mostly in Dutch or French and occasionally in German, and nearly all speech is accompanied by a deaf signer who performs live interpreting from what is being said. We have preprocessed the corpus with speaker diarisation, applied Belgian Dutch ASR, and post-ASR language identification and punctuation prediction as well as signer diarisation, sign language identification and sign language keypoint recognition. The corpus is made publicly available.