More on the SignTel Interpreter

[Angus B. Grieve-Smith]

        I have received an email from Raanan Liebermann, the president of
SignTel.  Apparently my posting got around.  I'm reassured that people pay
attention to what goes on on this list, and that he cares what we think
about his product.

        In case my earlier remarks came off as disparaging, I want to make
it clear that I respect Mr. Liebermann and his employees' creativity and
their commitment to helping the Deaf make use of technology.  I am also
impressed by the fact that SignTel employs over one hundred Deaf and
hard-of-hearing people.

        Mr. Liebermann also clarified that his system does perform some
processing of the English input, particularly to convert idiomatic forms
into more plain language.  They are devoting a significant amount of
resources to the development of an ASL generation system.

        However, my core concerns are still there: the project focused on
the visual technology, with the linguistic technology as an afterthought.
No feedback was sought from the sign linguistics and computational
linguistics communities.

        Since a number of people on the list have expressed similar
feelings on these issues, I thought it was inappropriate to discuss them
over private email.  Instead, I invited Mr. Liebermann or one of his
employees to join this list and discuss them with all of us.

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