re signing avatars

[Fischer Susan]

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.

Susan Fischer
Susan.Fischer at rit.edu

Center for Research on Language
UCSD

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