{"id":942,"date":"2021-08-09T05:17:54","date_gmt":"2021-08-09T05:17:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/achrafothman.net\/site\/?p=942"},"modified":"2021-10-24T03:43:18","modified_gmt":"2021-10-24T03:43:18","slug":"overview-of-text-to-gloss-in-computational-sign-language-processing-slp","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/achrafothman.net\/site\/overview-of-text-to-gloss-in-computational-sign-language-processing-slp\/","title":{"rendered":"Overview of Text-to-Gloss in Computational Sign Language Processing (SLP)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Authors: Achraf Othman<\/span><\/p>\n

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Research and Innovation Letters \u2022 Volume 1 \u2022 Issue 1 \u2022 August 2021 \u2022 Published: August 9, 2021 \u2022 PDF<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

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Abstract- <\/strong><\/div>\n

Digital Accessibility to the content in web environments for people with hearing disabilities and with hearing impairment with a low level of literacy is becoming increasingly critical (Dena et al., 2020, Lahiri et al., 2020<\/span>). Several applications have been developed to solve this challenge (Othman et al., 2019<\/span>). Today, the existing solutions proposed by the literature to improve digital accessibility to web content and media for people with hearing disabilities remain limited and even not existing in Sign Language (SL) (Jemni et al., 2013<\/span>). Some of these applications have been developed to set up conversational agents based on three-dimensional technologies called avatars for translating a written text to SL. All these tools do not take into consideration the intonation and rhythm of the uttered words (Kipp et al., 2011<\/span>). This greatly reduces the quality of the translated web content for these people and can even make it incomprehensible only if we use video translating the content in SL by interpreters or Deaf users where the cost is very high. In any Sign Language, we\u2019re facing more challenges and issues based on the nature of the language itself. Shifting and interpreting from written text to SL requires many levels of linguistic processing toward reaching the cognitive meaning of the sentence.<\/p>\n

Transcription is the operation that substitutes a grapheme or a group of graphemes of a writing system for every phoneme or for every sound. It thus depends on the target language, a unique phoneme that can correspond to various graphemes following the considered language. In short, it is the writing of words or pronounced sentences in a given system. The transcription also aims at being without loss, so that it should be ideally possible to reconstitute the original pronunciation from this one by knowing the rules of transcription.<\/p>\n

Text-to-gloss\u2014also knows as sign language translation\u2014is the task to translate between a spoken language text and sign language glosses.\u00a0Zhao et al. (2000)<\/span> used a Tree Adjoining Grammar (TAG) based system for translating between English sentences and American Sign Language glosses. They parse the English text and simultaneously assemble an American Sign Language gloss tree, using Synchronous TAGs (Shieber and Schabes 1990; Shieber 1994<\/span>), by associating the ASL elementary trees with the English elementary trees and associating the nodes at which subsequent substitutions or adjunctions can take place. Synchronous TAGs have been used for machine translation between spoken languages (Abeill\u00e9, Schabes, and Joshi 1991<\/span>), but this is the first application to a signed language.<\/p>\n

For the automatic translation of gloss-to-text, Othman and Jemni (2012)<\/span> identified the need for a large parallel sign language gloss and spoken language text corpus. They develop a part-of-speech-based grammar to transform English sentences taken from the Gutenberg Project ebooks collection (Lebert 2008<\/span>) into American Sign Language gloss. Their final corpus contains over 100 million synthetic sentences and 800 million words and is the largest English-ASL gloss corpus that we know of. Unfortunately, it is hard to attest to the quality of the corpus, as they didn\u2019t evaluate their method on real English-ASL gloss pairs, and only a small sample of this corpus is available online.<\/p>\n

Acknowledgment<\/h2>\n

Photo by cottonbro from Pexels<\/a><\/p>\n

References<\/h2>\n
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