An avator doing bfi

[Dan Parvaz]

I'm sure the one thing standing between the Tunisian Deaf Community and
achieving their potential is the lack of a signing avatar :-)  Still, it is
potentially cool research with good dividends, particularly if it means the
development of a real Tunisian SL dictionary (as opposed to the previous
effort, which was a glossary meant to contribute to the perennial Pan-Arab
SL movement), grammar, etc.

A major chunk of the problem here rests with the lack of substantial corpora
of any kind, let alone parallel corpora.

-Dan.



On 9/17/07, Sara Morrissey <sara.morrissey2 at mail.dcu.ie> wrote:
>
> 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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