PhD defence in automatic SL processing

[R. J. Wolfe]

Michael,

Your thesis is most intriguing.  Will you be publishing on this, or making 
your dissertation available?

Best wishes for a most pleasant defense!

R. J. Wolfe, PhD.
Professor
School of Computing
DePaul University CST 401
243 S. Wabash Ave
Chicago, IL   60631
wolfe at cs.depaul.edu


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Michael Filhol" <michael.filhol at limsi.fr>
To: "slling-l" <slling-l at majordomo.valenciacc.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, June 24, 2008 3:08 AM
Subject: [SLLING-L] PhD defence in automatic SL processing


Dear all,

I am happy to inform you that I will defending my PhD on Friday, June
27, at Limsi in Orsay, France. You are invited in building 508 of the
Paris-11 University campus. Below is a summary of the thesis.

Thank you, and see some of you there maybe.

--
Formal approaches to representing the signs of Sign Languages are
traditionally parametric and this work shows that they are
inappropriate for use in computer science. The main reasons are: the
parameters used are neither all necessary nor do they form a sufficient
set; parameters take on fixed values whereas signs are dynamic in nature
and values change through time; parametric descriptions do not account
for the signs' adaptability to context, hence are not reusable, which
brings them to disregard the power in concision of sign languages. We
propose a model called Zebedee, which describes signs in a sequence of
timing units, each of which specifies a set of necessary and sufficient
constraints to apply to a skeleton. The signing space is regarded as a
Euclidean geometric space where any auxiliary geometric object may be
built. Dependencies between elements of the descriptions or indeed on
context are not only possible but also made relevant, and are based on
articulatory, semantic and cognitive issues. We then give two
complementary processes for evaluation: in computer science with the
implementation of Zebedee in a signing avatar animation platform and an
information display system for train stations, and in linguistics with a
data base and new possibilities of queries that linguists may want to
test. As prospects, we discuss different computational fields in which
Zebedee should be useful, and several present linguistic problems for
which it holds pieces of solutions.

--
Michael Filhol
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