<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Lucida Grande" size="3" style="font: 11.0px Lucida Grande">There's a group at NTT (the national phone and post office!)in Japan working on "translating" in both directions between spoken or written Japanese and what they are calling Japanese sign Language. It's really more transliterating to or from signed Japanese. When I observed a demonstration a few years ago, the generation of the signing avatar was pretty impressive; recognition was not, and it's a much more difficult task, not only because of the corpus problem but because we still don't have the basic necessary and sufficient conditions for sign recognition (à la the Haskins and Bell Labs research in the 1940s and 1950s). I think some patience is in order; it took about 50 years from the time speech recognition was envisaged until the time it was accurate enough to be practically useful (e.g., Dragon Naturally Speaking). Computer scientists often drastically underestimate the difficulty of determining constancy in the signal.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 11px/normal Lucida Grande; min-height: 13px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Lucida Grande" size="3" style="font: 11.0px Lucida Grande">Susan Fischer</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Lucida Grande" size="3" style="font: 11.0px Lucida Grande"><a href="mailto:Susan.Fischer@rit.edu">Susan.Fischer@rit.edu</a></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 11px/normal Lucida Grande; min-height: 13px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Lucida Grande" size="3" style="font: 11.0px Lucida Grande">Center for Research on Language</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Lucida Grande" size="3" style="font: 11.0px Lucida Grande">UCSD</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'Lucida Grande'" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px;"><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></span></font></div>
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