Sign Proccessing Software

[Dan Parvaz]

> For me, I would like to see the ability to access the SignWriter
> dictionary via symbol.  For example, if I know a sign has a certain
> handshape, movement, contact, whatever, I can type those.  It would be
> more like word-completion for many wordprocessors.

Word-completion is slightly easier when there are a fixed number of
words/morphological variations. Simply exhausting all the varieties of
"GIVE" would be, well, exhausting. If for purposes of word processing,
we could agree on a fixed number of (third-person) locations, that
might be a big help.

Another thing worth considering is building probabilistic models of ASL
text (Markov Models, say) so that there is even more predictive power
in the typing. In other words, there could be two sets of constraints
at play: one at the syntactic level (what words are likely to go here?)
and one at the graphemic level (given the symbols already entered in
this word, what is the word likely to be?). The more conventionalized
the writing gets, the smarter we can get about this, and the more we'll
know about SW from an information-theoretic viewpoint (i.e., what is
the entropy of location in a signed language? Is is the same as that of
handform?). Cool questions, IMHO.

One caveat: if we guide the entry process at the word-processing level,
it seems not only possible but likely that we would be guiding the
evolution of SW conventionalization -- and if years of Star Trek have
taught me anything, it's "don't mess with the timeline" :-). There is
plenty of HCI work to suggest that people will model their inputs to a
machine based on the feedback they receive (only natural, since we want
to be understood with a minimum of correction). Add to that the fact
that SW doesnt yet have a well-established tradition of writing outside
the word processing domain (aside from a few pockets here and there,
but nothing compared to, say, any modern European language), and it
bears discussion whether or not this is something we want to do.

Cheers,

Dan.
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