Research in Sign Language notations

[Jessica Hutchinson]

Hi everyone

My name is Jessica Hutchinson. I am a Computer Science/Linguistics
postgraduate student at Rhodes University, South Africa, doing a research
project in machine translation of sign languages. My research involves
looking at the various notations used to represent sign languages and
making a comparison in terms of how effectively each of them can be parsed
by a computer. The results of my research I hope will further improve the
area of Sign-To-Text translation.

I would like to build a couple of small systems that do statistical
translation from sign notation to English text, for each of the main
notations (starting with Sign Writing, HamNoSys and Stokoe). To do this,
however, I need quite a bit of data, and I have had trouble finding any
kind of parallel corpus for these notations. I am hoping to do the
translation on a sentence-by-sentence basis, so the kind of data I am
looking for would be sentences in a sign language matched to sentences in
English. I'm expecting ASL to be most accessible, and for comparison's sake
would prefer each notation in the same language, but anything will be
useful.

Furthermore, data would need to be in some kind of format that a computer
would be able to process - images in a pdf file aren't going to work so
well!

If anyone can help me to find that data that I need, I would greatly
appreciate it.


Regards,

Jessica Hutchinson
Research website: http://www.cs.ru.ac.za/research/g09h2318
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