Abstract
In signed languages, role shift is a process that can facilitate the description of statements, actions or thoughts of someone other than the person who is signing, and sign synthesis systems must be able to automatically create animations that portray it effectively. Animation is only as good as the data used to create it, which is the motivation for using corpus analyses when developing new tools and techniques. This paper describes work-in-progress towards automatically generating role shift in discourse. This effort includes consideration of the underlying representation necessary to generate a role shift automatically and a survey of current annotation approaches to ascertain whether they supply sufficient data for the representation to generate the role shift.