An avator doing bfi

[Sara Morrissey]

All work in this area is a long way from being a translation service, I can
assure you of that following 3 years PhD research on the topic of Machine
Translation of Sign Languages. Sadly most of the work that I've come across
in this area is similar to the work described in the BBC article in that it
is just a small project. I have seen very little consistant work in this
area with most of it being satellite projects related to other work so it
never gets very far. Also, sadly, many groups that work in this area have
little to no knowledge of the languages they are dealing with and often
little contact with Deaf communities or colleagues and are more interested
in the computing aspects.  I am aware of the forthcoming FP7 project which
does seem to intend spending a few years of research in this area:
http://www.ideal-ist.net/Countries/TN/PS-TN-1590 Well, I hope so at least,
I've applied for a postdoc position with them!!

I'd be interested in hearing anyone's opinion on both this project and any
other sign language machine translation projects they've come across. I
intend to continue working in this area so all input is valuable :o)

Namaste,
Sara

************************************
Sara Morrissey,
PhD Researcher,
National Centre for Language Technology,
School of Computing,
Dublin City University,
Dublin 9,
Ireland.
***********************************



On 15/09/2007, Dan Parvaz <dparvaz at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Sigh. Everytime some student on their Amazing Journey Of
> Self-Discovery<tm> "reinvents" a piece of deaf-related technology
> (datagloves for reading fingerspelling, signing avatars, etc.), some
> ignorant journalist is ready to hail it as a breakthrough.
>
> This was put together in a few months by a student intern. As far as I can
> tell (those knowing BSL please look at the video and correct me if I'm
> wrong), this is yet another relatively straightforward marriage of speech
> recognition and 3D animation. There's no indication that space, classifiers,
> etc. which would be part of a natural SL are being used here. As it stands,
> it's less useful than commercially available speech-to-text systems
> (DragonDictate, Via Voice, etc.)
>
> Don't surplus your interpreters just yet :-)
>
> Cheers,
>
> -Dan
>
>
>  On 9/15/07, GerardM < gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Hoi,
> > I read this article on the BBC website about a translation service
> > created by IBM that uses an avatar to translate into British Sign language
> > (bfi). Such technology could in principle also produce SignWriting
> > Thanks,
> >      Gerard
> >
> > http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6993326.stm
> >
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-- 
Blessed are the flexible, for they shall not be bent out of shape.
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