sign language parsing

[Zwitserlood, Inge]

Dear Galini,

Sorry for the late response, but I have been awfully busy in our project
(eSIGN) where partners in three countries (Great-Brittain, Germany and the
Netherlands) work together in order to produce animated sign language.

The aim of this project is to provide sign language interpretations of, or
support for written texts on the internet, in animated BSL, DGS and NGT.
Automatic translation is still too difficult since we don't know enough yet
about the grammar of the sign languages involved. Therefore, a programme is
being developed in which a person with a good command of one of the sign
languages involved can translate the written (English, German or Dutch) text
into the sign language in question, using a database of animated signs of
that language. The signs themselves are generated from HamNoSys
transcriptions.

For more details on the project and the partners involved, you can take a
look at
http://www.visicast.sys.uea.ac.uk/index.html

Some demos can be found at
http://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/esign/Demo.html

We are very interested in other projects on animated sign language. Could
you give us some more information about your project?

Best wishes,
Inge Zwitserlood


-----Original Message-----
From: G Sapountzaki
To: SLLING-L at ADMIN.HUMBERC.ON.CA
Sent: 31-10-2003 22:05
Subject: Re: sign language parsing

Quoting Dan Parvaz <dparvaz at UNM.EDU>:


> Are you referring to simply parsing a signed language, or are you
> talking about Machine Translation (in which syntactic parsing is
> often
> a step)?
Yes,thank you Dan! I mean Machine Translation.
And what do you mean by "written text?" What is the
> original form which would be "parsed?" HamNoSys? Papaspyrou's
orthography? A
> video signal? Glosses? And what kinds of input are required for the
> signing avatar?

The input will be written typed text and the output will be signed
animated video on screen. The project is a joint effort between 3D
animation video experts and linguists. At this first point we aim to
parse very simple sentences in GSL, still retaining as many as possible
of the phonological characteristics of GSL,not only manual signs.

How much of the phonological/phonotactics
> (kinematics,
> etc.) need to be pre-processed?
>
> I have other questions, but this is a good kick-off point. I suspect
> there are a few of us here who can handle one or more of those
> pieces
>
I have contacted one person who has had some practical experience on a
similar project so far, and I would really appreciate any additional
information on specific difficulties and pitfalls of such an attempt.
The rest of the team in our project have a strong background in their
own areas but, as the only sign linguist in the project, I suspect the
goals might be too ambitious...

Thanks for all comments,
Galini
> Cheers,
>
> Dan.
>
>