Authors:
María del Puy Carretero
;
Miren Urteaga
;
Aitor Ardanza
;
Mikel Eizagirre
;
Sara García
and
David Oyarzun
Affiliation:
Vicomtech-IK4 Research Center, Spain
Keyword(s):
Virtual Character, Automatic Translation, Sign Language, LSE, Natural Language Processing.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Agents
;
Applications
;
Artificial Intelligence
;
Bioinformatics
;
Biomedical Engineering
;
Enterprise Information Systems
;
Information Systems Analysis and Specification
;
Knowledge Engineering and Ontology Development
;
Knowledge-Based Systems
;
Methodologies and Technologies
;
Natural Language Processing
;
Operational Research
;
Pattern Recognition
;
Simulation
;
Symbolic Systems
Abstract:
Translation between spoken languages and Sign Languages is especially weak regarding minority
languages; hence, audiovisual material in these languages is usually out of reach for people with a hearing
impairment. This paper presents a domain-specific Basque text to Spanish Sign Language (LSE) translation
system. It has a modular architecture with (1) a text-to-Sign Language translation module using a Rule-
Based translation approach, (2) a gesture capture system combining two motion capture system to create an
internal (3) sign dictionary, (4) an animation engine and a (5) rendering module. The result of the translation
is performed by a virtual interpreter that executes the concatenation of the signs according to the
grammatical rules in LSE; for a better LSE interpretation, its face and body expressions change according to
the emotion to be expressed. A first prototype has been tested by LSE experts with preliminary satisfactory
results.