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

[Kimberley Shaw]

Congrarulations, this dictionary sounds like it will be a great
resource! Even better that it will be searchable by sign, which can be
a huge help to new signers.
Kudos!
Kim from Boston

On 10/7/09, Fernando Capovilla <fcapovilla at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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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