Sign boundary and hand articulation feature recognition in Sign Language videos

Machine Translation - In this paper we present a recommendation system for (semi-)automatic annotation of sign language videos exploiting deep learning techniques, which handle handshape...     

Educational resources and implementation of a Greek sign language synthesis architecture

In this paper, we present how creation and dynamic synthesis of linguistic resources of Greek Sign Language (GSL) may serve to support development and provide content to an educational multitask platform for the teaching of GSL in early elementary school classes. The presented system utilizes standard virtual character (VC) animation technologies for the synthesis of sign sequences/streams, exploiting digital linguistic resources of both lexicon and grammar of GSL. Input to the system is written Greek text, which is transformed into GSL and animated on screen. To achieve this, a syntactic parser decodes the structural patterns of written Greek and matches them into equivalent patterns of GSL, which are then signed by a VC. The adopted notation system for the representation of GSL phonology incorporated in the system’s lexical knowledge database, is Hamburg Notation System (HamNoSys). For the implementation of the virtual signer tool, the definition of the VC follows the h-anim standard and is implemented in a web browser using a standard VRML plug-in.     

A knowledge-based sign synthesis architecture

This paper presents the modules that comprise a knowledge-based sign synthesis architecture for Greek sign language (GSL). Such systems combine natural language (NL) knowledge, machine translation (MT) techniques and avatar technology in order to allow for dynamic generation of sign utterances. The NL knowledge of the system consists of a sign lexicon and a set of GSL structure rules, and is exploited in the context of typical natural language processing (NLP) procedures, which involve syntactic parsing of linguistic input as well as structure and lexicon mapping according to standard MT practices. The coding on linguistic strings which are relevant to GSL provide instructions for the motion of a virtual signer that performs the corresponding signing sequences. Dynamic synthesis of GSL linguistic units is achieved by mapping written Greek structures to GSL, based on a computational grammar of GSL and a lexicon that contains lemmas coded as features of GSL phonology. This approach allows for robust conversion of written Greek to GSL, which is an essential prerequisite for access to e-content by the community of native GSL signers. The developed system is sublanguage oriented and performs satisfactorily as regards its linguistic coverage, allowing for easy extensibility to other language domains. However, its overall performance is subject to current well known MT limitations.