"signing avatars" and other machine interpretation projects

[Angus B. Grieve-Smith]

On Wed, 29 Aug 2001, Karlin, Ben wrote:

> I don't think that the signing avatar projects [...] are based on
> "Sign is Easy."  From what I have seen they are early attempts to push
> technology in all directions.  They marry machine translation, gesture
> and speech recognition, video and graphics processing (polygamous
> marriage, here) in an attempt to meet a need.

        A few of them do; I should have mentioned the European ViSiCAST
project, which our colleagues in Hamburg are working on and the one at the
Central Research Laboratories in Japan that I believe Daisuke Hara is
working on.  There are also some that focus on a particular subcomponent,
like synthesis or recognition, and wisely avoid an attempt at full
translation.

        I have to say that these are only a few.  Most of the projects are
developed by computer scientists with no understanding of linguistics and
little or no knowledge of any sign language.  Simply put, there is NO
machine translation going on for most of these projects.  Even the
ViSiCAST and CRL projects do not explicitly acknowledge that any form of
machine translation is neccessary (and hence avoid any acknowledgment of
the current limits in machine translation), but only make vague references
to "artificial intelligence" and "natural language processing."

> My interest in following the projects is that they attempt to codify
> what interpreting is.  I am not a linguist but an interpreter and find
> the cries for professionalization in my field premature as there is
> still no good description of what our work is.  If, by applying flow
> charts to it, these folks are able to help us standardize good
> practices, more power to them.

        This is a good point.  I once apologized to an interpreter for the
possibility that computational sign linguistics might put her out of a job
some day.  Her response, as I remember it, was "When I interpret, I do a
lot more than just translating one phrase into another.  There's a lot of
explanations both ways, and a lot of cultural negotiation.  It'll be a
long time before there's a machine that can do what I do."

        I'm just afraid that the people that hire interpreters aren't
going to know (or care) how much she does, and that no one is going to pay
attention to the Deaf people who complain that they can't understand the
computer.  The ad copy on the SignTel website suggests as much when it
pitches to "Government agencies that wish to comply with ADA regulations,"
(although it does say that it is not a substitute for an interpreter).

--
                                -Angus B. Grieve-Smith
                                Linguistics Department
                                University of New Mexico
                                grvsmth at unm.edu