to Val, Tim, Charles: about Novo Deit-Libras, CD-Rom, sign retrieval system, price, etc

Wed Oct 7 22:24:42 UTC 2009

Dear Valerie, Tim and Charles.
I have just subscribed the list in the Digest format.
Thus, I'll take the liberty of replying here to your messages, all at
once.  I hope you do not mind. Thank you.
Please read below.
Best regards,
Fernando

Dear Valerie!
Thank you so very much for your generosity and kindness in preparing such a
great announcement!
Congratulations for another piece of a beautiful work of yours!
I will subscribe to the list so to be able to reply to the questions. I
would like to apologize in advance should I not be able to reply immediately
to all questions. Thank you.
For the 2nd edition of the Novo Deit-Libras, we already have 1,700 brand new
signs and until 2012 shall prepare additional 7,000 brand new signs on
college curriculum areas such as Medicine, Biology, Physics, Chemestry,
Education, History, Geography, Anthropology, Law, Engeneering, Mathematics
etc. We are making an effort to engage Brazilian deaf people with college
degrees (preferably those pursuing graduate school) to contribute with signs
from their respective areas of study so as to obtain a Libras sign lexicon
capable of covering a wide range of disciplines in Libras.
We are succeeding so far, as the beautiful Novo Deit-Libras show. Thanks to
the cooperation of brilliant and caring people, the future for the Brazilian
deaf child seems quite bright, at last!
Sincere fraternal love.
Fernando

Dear Tim,
Thank you for writing.
In 2001 here at the University of Sao Paulo we have created a nice system
(named BuscaSigno - or Libras SignRetrieval System) which allows anyone to
locate and retrieve Libras signs (from the corpus of the Trilingual
Encyclopedic Illustrated Libras Dictionary, Capovilla & Raphael, 2001) on
the basis of sign forms rather than on the basis of Portuguese glosses. I
have demonstrated that system during a Gallaudet Seminar on Sign Language
Lexicography in 2002, and a paper about that was published in Sign Language
Studies. Our Libras SignRetrieval System works nicely. It allows deaf
students as well as foreigners who do not read Portuguese to locate and
retrieve Libras signs from the dictionary without having to depend on
Portuguese glosses. In the following years I have used BuscaSigno in order
to understand the cognitive processes involved in retrieving signs from a
lexicon (either mental or computerized) by hearing and deaf people. The
findings were incredibly exciting. I have discovered that the ease with
which someone manages to retrieve a give sign is an inverse function of the
logarithm of the average popularity of the cheremes that make up any given
sign! The lower the popularity of any given chereme, the higher its
importance as index for sign retrieval. BuscaSigno helped us to obtain the
distribution of cheremes in the Brazilian lexicon and is a precious tool for
comparative linguistics and cognitive linguistics of sign language structure
and processing. The mathematical function fits data perfetly. Pretty cool
original finding on cognitive neuropsycholinguistics of Sign Language
processing. I wonder if people at Gallaudet might be interested in that.
Anyway, now that we have doubled the size of the corpus in the Novo
Deit-Libras (Capovilla, Raphael, Mauricio, 2001), we are working on
BuscaSigno in order to expand its lexicon. As soon as we manage to do that,
we intend to publish in the CD-Rom format. However, I suspect that the 2nd
ed. of the Novo Deit-Libras will be published before that. Thank you for
your kind message.
Fernando

Dear Charles,
It is very nice to hear from you after all these years.
Thank you for the message and for your interest in our Novo Deit Libras
(NDL). I am afraid I still do not have any idea regarding price and
distribution. The Editora da USP Publisher is to decide all that when the
NDL is released this coming November. They will only know in November. I
appreciate your kind understanding.
I am glad to know you will be visiting Brazil, and especially to know that
you will include NDL in your comparative linguistics studies. Very nice
indeed. I hope I can be of some help to you in next Jan-February, when I
will have returned from a series of travels I am engaged in (I have
evaluated 8,000 deaf chidren from 15 states during 20 hours each, and now
the Ministry of Education is incorporating some of our tools and findings,
which puts an enormous demand on our research agenda. Ye it is quite
exciting. I hope we can discuss about that should you be interested too.).
Sincerely yours,
Fernando

-- 
Fernando Capovilla, PhD, Livre Docente
Professor, Instituto de Psicologia, USP
Av. Prof. Melo de Morais 1721
São Paulo, SP, 05508-900
fcapovilla at gmail.com

Sic transit gloria mundi. Aude sapere.
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