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THE CORPUS-DRIVEN REVOLUTION IN POLISH SIGN 
LANGUAGE: THE INTERVIEW WITH DR. PAWEŁ 
RUTKOWSKI 
Iztok KOSEM 
University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Arts 
Victoria NYST 
Leiden University, Faculty of Humanities 
Kosem, I., Nyst, V. (2017): The corpus-driven revolution in Polish Sign Language: the interview 
with Dr. Paweł Rutkowski. Slovenščina 2.0, 2017 (1): 70–90. 
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.4312/slo2.0.2017.1.70-90. 
Dr. Paweł Rutkowski is head of the Section for Sign Linguistics at the University 
of Warsaw. He is a general linguist and a specialist in the field of syntax of natural 
languages, carrying out research on Polish Sign Language (polski język migowy 
— PJM). He has been awarded a number of prizes, grants and scholarships by 
such institutions as the Foundation for Polish Science, Polish Ministry of Science 
and Higher Education, National Science Centre, Poland, Polish–U.S. Fulbright 
Commission, Kosciuszko Foundation and DAAD. 
Dr. Rutkowski leads the team developing the Corpus of Polish Sign Language and 
the Corpus-based Dictionary of Polish Sign Language, the first dictionary of this 
language prepared in compliance with modern lexicographical standards. The 
dictionary is an open-access publication, available freely at the following address: 
www.slownikpjm.uw.edu.pl/en/. 
This interview took place at eLex 2017, a biannual conference on electronic 
lexicography, where Dr. Rutkowski was awarded the Adam Kilgarriff Prize and 
gave a keynote address entitled Sign language as a challenge to electronic 
lexicography: The Corpus-based Dictionary of Polish Sign Language and beyond.  
The interview was conducted by Dr. Victoria Nyst from Leiden University 
(Faculty of Humanities), her PhD student Manolis Fragkiadakis, and Dr. Iztok 
Kosem from the University of Ljubljana (Faculty of Arts and Centre for Language 
Resources and Technologies). 
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Could you start by telling us how you got involved in sign language 
research? 
It all started for me seven years ago. I had no personal connections with the 
signing community, of any kind. I was doing research on generative syntax and 
at that time I strongly believed that Chomsky's universal grammar was the way 
to understand language. 
There was this professor, Marek Świdziński, who had become interested in sign 
languages in the mid-1990s. He is credited for introducing Polish Sign 
Language to the University of Warsaw as a regular subject. Thanks to him, for 
approximately the past 15 years it has been possible to opt for Polish Sign 
Language as a foreign language at the University of Warsaw. Professor 
Świdziński had come across a CODA (child of deaf adults) signer who was 
hearing, and this signer started telling him about sign language. He became 
interested and incidentally, at that very time he was the supervisor of my MA 
thesis on syntax. So he said to me, “Maybe you should try doing a syntactic 
analysis of that language, it seems to be a full-fledged natural language.” And 
being a generative syntactician, I thought, why not? I'll simply use my 
generative tools, go to deaf signers and tell them okay, here's an example and 
you either accept it, star it or question mark it. You give me your judgments and 
on the basis of that I'll tell you how universal grammar has been parameterized 
for the purposes of Polish Sign Language. I'll write a book about it and that's it.  
But then I started meeting deaf people to collect data. I remember my first such 
meeting – I showed a deaf person three possible orderings, and asked him 
which was the correct one for sign language. He looked at me and said: all of 
them are fine, all of them are as bad. To which I replied: yes, but you have to 
put stars on them, you have to judge them. And then the guy looked at me and 
I could read in his facial expression: oh my, another hearing idiot.  
My initial reaction was to conclude that this guy didn't know his own language, 
he couldn't even give me a grammaticality judgment. It was only later that I 
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realized that the way we often do linguistics is a kind of armchair linguistics, 
more suitable for those well-established Indo-European languages with a long 
tradition of schooling and literature. It's definitely much different from doing 
real fieldwork, collecting data from scratch and interviewing informants who 
have not been trained in what is correct and what isn't, but simply use the 
language without this background prescriptivist kind of knowledge that we 
normally receive at school. Now, when somebody asks me what is correct and 
what isn't in sign language, I simply laugh. Because it's not the right question 
to ask. But at that time I still thought it should be quite easy, that I would 
interview a handful of deaf informants and be able to analyse the syntactic 
structure of PJM on the basis of that.  
However, I soon realized that there was so much variation, and people were 
telling me that it was all context-dependent, not to mention dependent on the 
three-dimensional space of signing. You cannot simply see strings of words as 
comparable to strings of signs in sign languages. So I decided that since they 
couldn't give me clear judgments, I would collect data, create a corpus and then 
on the basis of the corpus I would see what the truth really is. My team started 
collecting the corpus as a solid basis for our research and my plan was to do it 
systematically, collect a couple of hours of data and then analyse it. But once 
you start analysing the data, you again see how much variation there is. You can 
only talk about tendencies but never strict rules, as all corpus linguists know. 
But in order to be able to say what the dominant pattern is, you really have to 
have more and more data, which is again something quite obvious to corpus 
linguists. Unfortunately, with sign languages it's very difficult to get a lot of 
data. Where do you take it from? It's not readily available, so you have to create 
a corpus. And that is how me and my team reached the decision that whatever 
we did, it would be corpus-based. We didn't want to rely on individual 
intuitions. It happens very often that the same person tells you that something 
seems to be the best pattern for Polish Sign Language, but the next week they 
tell you the complete opposite. Therefore, we decided to base whatever we do 
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on corpus data.  
What tools are available, how do you choose between them and what 
are the challenges in setting up a sign language corpus? 
When you start compiling a sign-language corpus, it's very important to decide 
how you're going to do it and whether you're going to do it on your own or with 
a very limited team of people. And then you can obviously go for something that 
you can easily manipulate, like ELAN files which you can store on your 
computer and manage locally. But our plan from the very beginning was to have 
a large team of annotators that would work simultaneously. We didn't want to 
have ten different types of styles of annotation that would have to be unified 
somehow at the end of the day. Therefore, when we decided we wanted to learn 
more about Polish Sign Language, we visited Christian Rathmann and Thomas 
Hanke in Hamburg. We had a look at what they were doing and at that time we 
decided that using the iLex software developed at the University of Hamburg 
was better for our purposes, because it uses a centralized database. This means 
that all the annotators working on the videos access the database and do all the 
annotations online. That way, whatever they include in the database is 
immediately available to all the other annotators. Obviously when it comes to 
the coherence of the system, this is very important. We were able to proceed 
very quickly thanks to the know-how and software that we got from Hamburg, 
which we are very grateful for. Secondly, they shared their procedures, which 
we could follow. They also let us use some of their elicitation materials. So they 
were very open to collaboration with us.  
We wanted to have as many deaf annotators as we could possibly attract to 
become part of this project. And becoming an annotator requires lots of training 
and a specific background, especially in linguistics, which not many deaf people 
have. There are very few deaf people at Polish universities, which is a shame. So 
obviously most of the deaf annotators who work on our project right now had 
to be trained from scratch. You could say it was a high-risk investment, since 
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many of those people that we did train turned out not to be capable of doing the 
job or simply found it boring.  
How many annotators do you have at the moment? 
It fluctuates, but we have around fifteen people involved right now. Some of 
them are assigned to very limited chunks of videos, while some of them work 
extensively, several hours per day. So it all depends on the person, their 
availability and their willingness to work. We want to include as many people 
as possible in the team and then possibly ask them to work more if they find the 
job interesting.  
Do you all work at the same location?  
No, the system is such that you can work at home or wherever you want, 
because you are able to access the server online. But the good thing is that some 
of these annotators are already thinking about writing MAs and PhDs in 
linguistics, based on the experience that they were able to gain being part of this 
team. This is very satisfying from the point of view of the team as a whole, 
because the situation we really didn't want to happen was that the hearing 
linguists would go to the deaf community and tell them, »okay, now we will 
describe your language.« It's just the opposite – right now, the majority of my 
team consists of deaf annotators and had it not been for their work, we wouldn't 
have done so much in such a short period of time. We started only six years ago 
and today we have perhaps the second largest or the largest sign language 
corpus in the world, just next to the German one. 
What is the average length of training for a beginner? 
The true answer is that training is basically endless and always ongoing. Even 
the most experienced annotators will still have things to discuss because 
obviously the more videos you have, the more new signs you have. And the new 
signs require some discussion, so the team of our annotators has regular 
meetings where they discuss such matters. But in general, I would say that in 
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order to start annotating the way we annotate, you need a month of training. 
This involves receiving a task, doing it, having it corrected by somebody and 
being told what you should have done differently. After a month, you are able 
to start annotating and producing useful results. They will not be perfect, but 
you will be able to include them into the system as real annotations. So everyone 
starts slowly and then the more experience they gain, the quicker they work.  
You mentioned the challenge of internal coherence in the corpus. 
Would you say that coherence challenges are larger for a sign 
language corpus than for a spoken language corpus? 
Of course. First of all, you have to remember that there are no written sources 
of data, so all you work with is videos. When it comes to videos, you have 
individual productions of signs that will be subject to lots of variation, both 
inter-signer and intra-signer. The same person will produce the same sign 
differently depending on the context or the situation. For example, it will vary 
depending on who the person is signing to. The extent of variation is definitely 
much larger than in spoken languages, especially in those Indo-European 
written and spoken languages that we as linguists mostly deal with. This is a 
consequence of the fact that there is no schooling in Polish Sign Language, or 
most sign languages for that matter. There is no literature, no established canon 
for the sign language. There is no prescriptive tradition, no committees that 
might tell you what is good Polish Sign Language and what isn't.  
And then of course we should not forget the very specific socio-linguistic 
situations, namely the fact that more than 90% of deaf kids are born into 
hearing families. These kids often acquire sign language at a relatively late stage 
of their lives, say at the age of seven when they go to school. And when you 
compare them to truly native signers, meaning those who grow up in deaf 
families – the latter will be very often treated by other signers as using a very 
particular idiolect, a so-called familylect, belonging to their particular family. 
Such users are possibly not representative of the whole community. So we will 
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have a lot of variation and an annotator of sign language data will have to deal 
with that and decide whether, for example, two occurrences of similar 
productions are occurrences of the same lexeme or of two different lexemes. If 
you don't manage the whole thing adequately, what you can end up with is that 
the very same sign has been annotated in ten different ways by ten different 
people.  
Another thing is that you can't simply reflect the articulation of a sign; you need 
to use a gloss of some kind. Since glosses usually come from the spoken 
language, and in this case no written language exists, the choice of a gloss 
obviously depends on the annotator. There's no obvious connection between 
the sign and the gloss. Therefore, I think it's very important to have a system 
that somehow forces the annotators to use the same glosses for the same signs, 
and this is precisely what iLex does: it requires you to choose a gloss from a 
drop-down list. You don't simply create a gloss on the basis of what you think a 
particular sign means in a particular sentence.  
So this system forces you to be very systematic and to use a very 
strong link between the gloss and the sign. I would imagine that the 
results are very systematic but the process must be very time-
consuming in the initial phase, when you are still setting it up. 
Yes, you have to think twice before you decide on either ilex or ELAN. iLex is 
definitely more complicated when you start because you have to set up quite an 
advanced system. You have to set up a database that will be accessed by all the 
annotators and you have to train all of them on how to use the system. You also 
have to double check what they're doing, have meetings, explain to them why 
they can't do certain things, etc. However, once your annotators reach the level 
of competence that lets them do the job fluently, then the system is much more 
efficient. 
You mentioned the use of glosses that are taken from the spoken 
language. iLex also uses HamNoSys annotations. Could you explain 
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a bit about what HamNoSys is and why you still use glosses? 
HamNoSys is a phonetic transcription. It basically gives you symbols that 
correspond to particular articulation features of a given sign. There are symbols 
for handshapes, symbols for the orientation of a sign, etc. For practical everyday 
purposes, it is a bit inconvenient. A single sign will have to be transcribed with 
a number of symbols, because each articulatory aspect of a sign has to be 
reflected with a separate diacritic. We do use it for obvious reasons, one of the 
things that we can think of is the possibility of an IT implementation – we want 
the corpus to be machine readable so that it can serve, for example, as a basis 
for an avatar which produces visualizations of the signs. But from the point of 
view of human annotators and memorizing thousands of signs, it is obviously 
much more convenient to use labels. However, we don't want to use glosses for 
the purposes of our dictionary, because we wouldn't like to confuse the end 
user, who is not an expert. Neither would we like to give the impression that 
there is a one-to-one correspondence between a Polish word and a sign. So 
whichever gloss we use, even if it says hand, house or whatever, we always add 
an affix giving the basics of articulation, so that the annotator can know which 
variants of the given sign we're talking about. But we understand, and the 
annotators understand as well, that even if the label says driver, it could as well 
mean to drive a car, a steering wheel, etc., depending on the context. So a user 
of the language will know that and will treat a particular label as a kind of tool. 
The end users could think that a given sign in the dictionary corresponds 
semantically or syntactically to a given Polish word and we wouldn't like to give 
that impression. 
Nowadays we collaborate closely with Trevor Johnston and we are very much 
inspired by his corpus work on Auslan. Trevor visits us every year and spends a 
month discussing and working with us on our corpus. For example, we are now 
beginning to tag for sentential structures, causal structures, argument 
structures, etc. We don't only have glosses, HamNoSys transcripts and 
segmentation into signs, we also try to do other levels of annotations. We tag 
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non-manual signals, as well as do sentential translations and part of speech 
analysis. So it's a multi-tier approach.  
How often do you encounter a new variation of a sign? If the corpus 
is uniform, let's say, maybe an automatic annotator could be used. 
In principle I would love somebody to offer a tool that could do the annotation 
automatically. But in practice, I think it's very, very difficult – I say this partly 
on the basis of our experience. Probably all of us sign language linguists have at 
some stage been approached by IT experts who claimed they could do it 
automatically. But then they try to do a hundred signs and the success of 
recognition is 50%. You have to remember that you never get the ideal framing 
of a video, that people will move and not sign ideally for computer recognition 
and so on. I'm not saying it's impossible, probably everything is possible. But 
for now we have to do everything manually.  
You asked about variance – what we saw in these five or six years was that in 
the first stage of the process the number of new signs grew very rapidly and our 
lexicon expanded very quickly. At the stage where we are now, new lexical items 
only pop up occasionally, whereas new variants are found every day. So there 
are more and more variants but the number of lexeme signs seems to be quite 
stable and grows very steadily. I suppose this tells you that there is a lot of 
variation. Obviously sometimes the differences are minute.  
Can you give an example?  
For example, whether you use one finger or two fingers, or whether you touch 
your cheek closer to the nose or closer to the ear, there's always a question of 
whether something is a variant or not. The very word deaf in Polish could in 
principle be understood as having two variants, since you can sign it close to 
your ear and your mouth or almost vertically on your cheek. So are these two 
variants of the same sign? Most people will tell you it's just a production, but 
from the point of view of a machine it could be problematic.  
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As in spoken languages, we find a lot of variation in sign languages. 
You have regional variation, there is age-based variation, a kind of 
subculture variation …  
But when it comes to regional variation, it's very difficult to trace it. The German 
team recently presented very interesting results: when you search for dialectal 
differences, there are not that many to be found in the basic set of vocabulary. 
It would appear that everybody is using the same set of signs. It's only when you 
check for the second and third variant that the differences really start to show. 
So the most frequent variant of a given sign is likely to be used inter-dialectally, 
as a kind of a lingua franca mechanism. But then you have second, third, fourth 
variants which are very often used only locally. This means that if you really 
want to see the variation, you have to go very deep into your data. This is 
problematic because obviously those second, third or fourth variants are used 
quite infrequently, and you need a really massive corpus to be able to say that 
the fourth most frequent variant of a given sign is used predominantly in a 
particular region. If you are working with a very limited set of data, you will not 
be able to have that precision.  
I think some different observations have been made where it was 
shown that typically, regional variation is actually based on school 
variation in many countries. There was some discussion about that 
in Germany.  
In Poland it's even more complicated. Members of the deaf community 
normally point out that the divisions seem to follow the historical partitions of 
Poland. In the 19th century, the country was divided between the Austro-
Hungarian Empire, Russia and Prussia. Poland didn't exist as a country, but the 
people did, as well as the deaf. The three deaf communities of Poland were 
influenced by either the German, the Russian, or the Austro-Hungarian way of 
signing. Nowadays, an obvious major influence will be the schooling system. 
Currently in Poland you have more than 30 schools for the deaf and they will 
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differ quite radically in terms of how strongly they encourage or allow the use 
of sign language. Some of them are strictly oralist and discourage the use of sign 
language, while the teachers are not able to sign anyway. In these schools, the 
language develops parallel to what they do at school, so to speak.  
On the other hand, we have schools where sign language is used extensively. 
For example, in Warsaw is the oldest Polish school for the deaf, which was 
established in 1817, precisely 200 years ago. So you could say that the Polish 
Sign Language is 200 years old, because in a way without schools there wouldn't 
have been any sign language. 
Was the establishment of deaf education in Poland somehow 
inspired by the happenings in France? 
Yes, actually the first school for the deaf in Poland was established by a priest 
who went to Paris and transferred their methods, to which some basic signs 
were added. So if you want to see Polish Sign Language as belonging to a 
language family, probably the French Sign Language family would be the origin. 
But obviously nowadays it's much different.  
Do you also see age variation? 
Of course. It's a very complex system, because it's not only a question of one’s 
age, but also which school one went to and probably where one currently lives 
as well. Whatever data we collect, we always supplement it with a metadata 
questionnaire in which the participants are asked to provide information on 
where they were born, where they went to school, where they live now and how 
long have they lived in a given place. As you know, signers will adapt their way 
of signing quite easily, depending both on the circumstances and on the person 
they sign to. We're now producing numerous textbooks that are used at schools 
for the deaf and were commissioned by the Polish Ministry of National 
Education. As a reviewer of our work, they selected someone from a different 
city, Lublin, which is in the southeast. They wanted the reviewer to come from 
a different sociolect and to have regular contact with other ways of signing, so 
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that they can say whether what we're doing is comprehensible from the point of 
view of the kids over there. It often turns out that they wouldn't use the same 
sign we did in a certain situation, and then we then replace the sign with 
something that is acceptable for them. It's a tricky job because we want the 
textbooks to be as accessible as possible to every deaf kid. On the other hand, 
we want to show them the intelligentsia's way of signing, the way that young 
deaf intellectuals who mostly come from big cities use. All our sign language 
translators for the textbook project are young people between 20 and 40 and 
are leaders of their communities in big cities. They study at universities or have 
already graduated. In this way we would like to defeat a certain argument that 
we have faced so many times in the past: that supposedly in sign language you 
can't talk about physics, for example, or other abstract things, because you will 
not have enough vocabulary, terminology, etc. But these young translators who 
work on the project are proving that you can obviously translate everything. It's 
a different issue whether the end user knows the signs, but this is precisely what 
we want to teach them. We do this in the hope that these technical signs will 
spread in the community.  
It's clearly an epic project for the sign language community in 
Poland.  
In the last three years, we have produced around one hundred textbooks. If I'm 
not mistaken, this is the largest project of its kind in Europe. It means a drastic 
change when you compare it to what the situation in Poland used to be. We used 
to not have any textbooks and sign language was generally disregarded or 
treated as inferior to spoken language communication. Then, just three years 
ago, the Ministry decided they wanted to have textbooks in Polish Sign 
Language, but there was nobody to produce them. They contacted my team and 
our initial reaction was: we're researchers first and foremost, involved in 
academia, should we really be the ones to produce school textbooks? But we 
concluded that if it wasn't us, then nobody would do them, and that's how it all 
started. We've been producing them for the last three years. And this is a 
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separate team from the corpus team, working on the textbooks only.  
What's the legal status of Polish Sign Language?  
It changed in 2011 with a new law that granted considerable communication 
rights to the deaf community when it comes to their contacts with state 
administration. When they go to a public office now, they are able to ask for an 
interpreter. However, there are still many tricky points. In principle, all the 
state-run services, like hospitals, police stations, courts, etc. should be included, 
but the truth is that it will take time. Nowadays I'm a member of the Council for 
Sign Language formed by the Ministry of Family, Labour and Social Policy. We 
decided that one of our main priorities should be to work on regulations that 
would lead to Polish Sign Language being used in courts as a regular »foreign« 
language. At the moment, it's not really recognized at courts as a language 
different from Polish. It doesn't have the status of a minority language, it's more 
like signing is accepted as a way of communicating, similar to say the 
communication systems of the deafblind. This is because sign language is 
regulated by the same law as deafblind communication.  
So it is considered more a tool than a language? 
Sort of. The deaf have rights and the language is explicitly mentioned in the new 
law, but on the other hand it's not mentioned in other places, for example in the 
law on court interpreters. 
How is funding arranged? 
When the Section for Sign Linguistics was created, we received generous 
funding from the Foundation for Polish Science, a non-governmental 
organisation which sponsors research projects that they consider worth it. Had 
it not been for them, we wouldn't be here today. They took the risk of financing 
something that had never been financed before in Poland. They decided our 
project was worthwhile and initially granted us funds for the first three years of 
our corpus work. As we proved successful in the first three years it became 
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much easier for us to get new sponsors, including two ministries and the 
National Science Centre, among others. 
Do you get any feedback from the users and do you carry out studies 
in this area? 
We don't have any formal way of eliciting feedback, but we are planning to do 
something in that vein. This is all still happening, right now we are still working 
on things that we want to be used by the deaf community, both the dictionary 
that we produced just last year and the textbooks I talked about earlier. 
Obviously at some more advanced stage, we would like to get feedback in a more 
formalized way, like a questionnaire of some kind, and online forms where 
people could simply add new signs or suggest changes, etc.  
With sign language dictionaries you'll have very different groups of possible 
users. As you can imagine, your dictionary will definitely be used by hearing 
non-signers who want to learn the language and their perspective will be very 
different from the one that we assumed. Our perspective was to produce an 
academic dictionary which reflects what the language really is like, not to relate 
Polish to sign language. Traditional dictionaries, or rather word lists, that used 
to be produced in the past assumed that you started with a spoken language. 
For example, you take the word house (or the Polish equivalent dom) and you 
want to learn what it is in Polish Sign Language. What we did was the opposite, 
we didn't care about Polish, or which Polish words we would like to have in our 
dictionary. We started from the corpus, we saw which signs were found in it, 
and all those that appeared at least four times were included. Only then did we 
give them definitions. 
The only difference between a monolingual dictionary and our dictionary, 
which in a way is a monolingual sign language dictionary, is that the meta 
language is still Polish. The definition is given in Polish, but we don't work on 
the basis of equivalence. We do give Polish equivalence but only after the 
definitions. The definition defines a particular use of a particular sign and then 
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we give possible Polish equivalent for that particular use. So if you’re a learner 
and want to find out what house is in Polish Sign Language, you can search for 
house within the equivalence. You'll get several signs, all of them somehow 
being possible equivalents to the Polish word house. But the differences will be 
described in the sense that you will have a definition which corresponds to that 
particular use of a particular sign. Therefore, our dictionary is not that useful 
from the point of view of a learner. Their perspective is that it's too complicated, 
that it would be much easier if we just gave the Polish word and then a sign and 
that's it. But we didn't want to do that. 
We also included sentential examples, which I think is one of the most 
important advantages of our dictionary. And it wasn't us who created the 
sentences to illustrate how signs are used, we basically took sentences from the 
PJM Corpus. Whoever uses the dictionary, they can be sure that whatever we 
included as an example is really attested and not made up. This is definitely a 
huge advantage when compared to other sources of information on how sign 
language sentences should be produced, because those other available sources 
will always be whimsical in the sense that somebody simply decided that this is 
the way you should produce a given sentence. While we do have those examples 
extracted from the corpus, we didn't include the original videos, but rather 
restaged them with the members of our team. There are two reasons for this, 
the more important one being anonymity. We don't want people to feel uneasy. 
Although they did agree, we still don't want them to feel uneasy after a couple 
of years, when they will maybe become dissatisfied with the sentences they 
produced. Sometimes they talk about sensitive issues, sometimes they talk 
about what they think about, for example, cochlear implants. At the time of 
recording they may have been very critical but in 20 years’ time they might have 
changed their mind. The other reason is that in the corpus recordings, a lot of 
times people will turn, move, there might be a pause where they think. For the 
purposes of the dictionary we restaged everything in clear, nicely framed 
recordings.  
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Are there any additional features that you would like to implement 
in your dictionary? 
Definitely. First of all, our dictionary was completed a year ago while the 
compilation of our corpus was still in progress. Since then our corpus has 
grown. I would first like the dictionary to be updated on the basis of the corpus 
that we currently have. However, as this requires time and funding, it's not 
something we're planning to do at the moment. Instead we intend to wait until 
our corpus is even bigger and then at some stage we'll simply decide that we're 
not continuing the compilation of the corpus, or perhaps we'll decide we're at a 
phase at which we want to update the dictionary.  
There were other ideas; some people suggested having the definitions in sign 
language. As you can imagine, it would require a lot of work to record that, but 
it would indeed give us a perfectly monolingual dictionary of Polish Sign 
Language. It would take ages; and most signers are bilingual to some extent, so 
they are able to read the definitions anyway. We try to make them as 
straightforward as possible, obviously.  
Another suggestion was to translate the definitions into English, so the use of 
the dictionary could be international, it could be used for example by 
researchers from other countries.  
What about dictionary's search functionalities? 
Our search functionalities are quite fine for the time being. Since they are based 
on the HamNoSys transcription, we can search through hand shapes and 
different other parameters. The only thing is that searching is much easier from 
the point of view of somebody who knows the language. Imagine that you do a 
search for a sign that has a given handshape, is produced in a given location, 
etc. You'll get five, six, maybe even ten results. You will have to click on each of 
them to find out precisely which one is the one you're looking for. But I think 
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it's still much better than what used to be the case with all those old-fashioned 
»dictionaries« for sign languages, which worked one-way only. You could only 
look up Polish words and find out the sign language equivalent. But if a learner 
or a user wanted to find out the meaning of a sign, there was no way they could 
find it. You didn't have any search options. What we are offering is quite precise 
in the sense that you can really opt for many articulatory aspects of a given sign 
and still get 10 results. Then you have to decide which one is the sign you're 
interested in. 
How many units do you currently have in the dictionary? 
For the time being we have some three thousand lexemes. In our database we 
can see more than five thousand different signs, and almost thirteen thousand 
different subunits, each of which could correspond to a lexeme in a spoken 
language. Imagine a situation – this would be a sign (touches his chest with tips 
of all five fingers – http://www.slownikpjm.uw.edu.pl/gloss/view/184). It means two 
very different things. One of the meanings is director, the etymology being that 
the first director of the school for the deaf wore a medal of some kind. So this 
sign became the name sign for that particular director. Later it started to be 
used for any director, for example a director of a university department, or a 
school director and so on. The second meaning of this sign is pain, because pain 
comes from inside. So the same shape will count as one sign from the point of 
view of basic macro level distinctions, but then it would count as at least two 
subtypes because of the different semantic uses.  
Like homonyms basically. 
Yes. But then again, in this case it's quite clear that they are homonyms. As you 
know in many cases, it's very difficult to say whether it's homonymy or 
polysemy, because some of the meanings are semantically related. For example, 
university is signed like this (drags thumb and index finger across his cuff – 
http://www.slownikpjm.uw.edu.pl/gloss/view/562), but it can also mean the cuff itself. 
In this case, there is a historical relation, because the university uniforms two 
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hundred years ago had distinctive cuffs. So the sign for university is related to 
the cuff. We could say it's the same sign, but obviously you would rather treat 
them as homonyms. 
In the Netherlands, we see that most of the corpus of the sign 
language of the Netherlands is available online and is also used quite 
extensively by students of our BA interpreter training program. So 
the corpus is used as a teaching tool for hearing non-signers. To 
what extent is your corpus open and to what extent it is used beyond 
your research team? 
For the time being it's not open. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, it's still 
being compiled. We want to wait with any kind of publication until we finish, 
or at least finish some stage of our work. Secondly, with iLex it's much more 
complicated to have easy access to what we produce, because you have to get 
access to the database and we can't easily make it available online at this stage. 
However, we're waiting to see how it goes for the German team, because if I'm 
correct, they're planning to publish their corpus sometime this year. As in the 
past, we're planning to decide what to do based on their experience. As far as I 
know they're planning to publish the original iLex files, their ELAN 
conversions, which is a much more widely used system among sign language 
researchers, and also HTML scripts that will be available online.  
Also, you must not forget several aspects of publishing the corpus. Whatever we 
do, it is unlikely to be openly accessible to anyone, because of obvious ethical 
and anonymity issues. In contrast to spoken language texts, which can be 
anonymized quite easily, the same can't be done with sign language texts, where 
you'll be able to see the face of the person. What we do is ask the participants of 
our project to grant us all possible rights when it comes to future publication of 
their image and what they say. But we still wouldn't like anybody, their friends, 
neighbours, etc. to be able to download the file in 20 years’ time and see what 
they said and how they looked 20 years ago and then poke fun at them. We 
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think we'll limit access to the videos to those that really do have a reason to 
access them, such as researchers, students and other groups.  
It's quite remarkable that Poland now has the largest or at least one 
of the largest sign language corpora. Only a few years ago, very little 
sign language research or documentation was being done. As of 
now, Poland has actually surpassed many countries with a long 
history of sign language research, like the United States, France, etc. 
Which were the special circumstances that led to this sudden boom 
of Polish Sign Language corpus work?  
It was a combination of factors. One of them was funding. But what I think was 
a crucial decision that we made at the very beginning and that actually made 
the whole thing possible, was to invest in deaf annotators. In some other 
projects people are sort of hesitant, thinking that most deaf people will not have 
enough training and not enough background in linguistics, etc. Or people think 
they can do it with the help of just one annotator. They expect one person to do 
the whole thing, but it's impossible for them to do thousands and thousands of 
minutes of annotations. I think that in many projects, the involvement of the 
deaf was much more limited as compared to ours. Whenever I have the chance, 
I try to underline the importance of my deaf colleagues, who are probably right 
now annotating the material back home in Warsaw. I would also like to thank 
three hearing colleagues of mine: Joanna Filipczak, Anna Kuder and Piotr 
Mostowski, who are PhD candidates at the University of Warsaw and have 
invested enormous amounts of time and energy in the PJM Corpus project in 
the last couple of years. 
What does the Adam Kilgarriff prize mean to you and possibly to the 
wider community, in the context of your project and everything that 
we've just talked about?  
Since the fact that I got the prize was announced, I've received hundreds of 
emails from people I know and people I don't know. Some of them were from 
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the spoken language linguistics community, saying how good it is that sign 
language had been noticed. This is great, but what was even more important to 
me was that many people from the sign language field emailed me, asking me 
to come here and represent them, and tell the world about what we are doing. 
Nowadays it's much better than say 10 or 15 years ago, because whatever 
conference you go to, it's likely to include a talk on sign language topics, but I 
still think that the general understanding of how sign languages work, what 
they are like and how deaf people function communication-wise is still very 
limited among the hearing. The more situations like this one here at this 
conference where you can talk to people who probably have a limited knowledge 
of what sign languages are, the better. I am obviously personally honoured and 
personally flattered by the possibility of talking to such a wonderful audience at 
eLex. But I also in a way feel a representative of the community I'm part of.  
Thank you very much for doing this interview.  
 
ACKNOWLEDGEME NTS  
The Corpus-based Dictionary of Polish Sign Language was created as part of a 
research project financed by Poland’s National Science Centre within the 
HARMONIA program (title: Iconicity in the grammar and lexicon of Polish 
Sign Language (PJM), grant number: 2011/01/M/HS2/03661). 
The expansion of the PJM corpus is currently being funded by the National 
Programme for the Development of Humanities (NPRH) of the Polish Ministry 
of Science and Higher Education (title: Multi-layered linguistic annotation of 
the corpus of Polish Sign Language (PJM), grant number: 
0111/NPRH3/H12/82/2014). 
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KORPUSNOJEZIKOSLOVNA REVOLUCIJA V 
POLJSKEM ZNAKOVNEM JEZIKU: INTERVJU Z DR. 
PAWLOM RUTKOWSKIM 
Dr. Pawel Rutkowski je vodja Odseka za znakovni jezik na Univerzi v Varšavi. Je 
splošni jezikoslovec in strokovnjak za področje skladnje naravnih jezikov, 
raziskovalno pa se ukvarja s poljskim znakovnim jezikom (polski język migowy 
— PJM). Je prejemnik številnih nagrad in štipendij različnih inštitucij, kot so 
Poljska znanstvena fundacija, poljsko ministrstvo za znanost in visoko šolstvo, 
Državni znanstveni center Republike Poljske, Poljsko-ameriška Fulbrightova 
komisija, Kosciuszkova fundacija in DAAD.  
Dr. Rutkowski je vodja ekipe, ki razvija Korpus poljskega znakovnega jezika in 
Korpusni slovar poljskega znakovnega jezika, prvi tovrstni slovar, zasnovan v 
skladu s sodobnimi leksikografskimi smernicami. Slovar je prosto dostopen na 
naslovu www.slownikpjm.uw.edu.pl/en/. 
Intervju je potekal med konferenco o e-leksikografiji eLex 2017, ki poteka vsaki 
dve leti. Na konferenci je dr. Rutkowski prejel nagrado Adama Kilgariffa, hkrati 
pa je bil glavni govornik s temo Znakovni jezik kot izziv e-leksikografije: Korpusni 
slovar poljskega znakovnega jezika – in naprej. Intervju sta izvedla dr. Victoria 
Nyst s Fakultete za humanistiko Univerze v Leidnu ter dr. Iztok Kosem z Univerze 
v Ljubljani (Filozofska fakulteta in Center za jezikovne vire in tehnologije). 
 
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