Sign Language Phonetic Annotation meets Phonological CorpusTools: Towards a sign language toolset for phonetic notation and phonological analysis

Tkachman, Oksana; Hall, Ken J.; Xavier, André Nogueira; Gick, Bryan

doi:10.3765/amp.v3i0.3667

Cited by 6 publications

(7 citation statements)

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“…Such a system would be analogous to the International Phonetic Alphabet, whose aim is to provide a unique symbol for each sound in a language and to serve as a standard for transcribing spoken language. To this end, researchers have been developing and utilizing phonetic representations since the 1980s [51][52][53].…”

Section: Phonemic and Phonetic Representationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Sign Language Avatars: A Question of Representation

et al. 2022

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Given the achievements in automatically translating text from one language to another, one would expect to see similar advancements in translating between signed and spoken languages. However, progress in this effort has lagged in comparison. Typically, machine translation consists of processing text from one language to produce text in another. Because signed languages have no generally-accepted written form, translating spoken to signed language requires the additional step of displaying the language visually as animation through the use of a three-dimensional (3D) virtual human commonly known as an avatar. Researchers have been grappling with this problem for over twenty years, and it is still an open question. With the goal of developing a deeper understanding of the challenges posed by this question, this article gives a summary overview of the unique aspects of signed languages, briefly surveys the technology underlying avatars and performs an in-depth analysis of the features in a textual representation for avatar display. It concludes with a comparison of these features and makes observations about future research directions.

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Section: Phonemic and Phonetic Representationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…: Available at https://sigbank.org (5 April 2022). 9 :[53] describe efforts to incorporate SLPA[67] into a phonological corpus tool. 10 :[56].…”

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confidence: 99%

Sign Language Avatars: A Question of Representation

et al. 2022

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“…SLPAnnotator is a program that allows researchers to build phonetically transcribed sign language corpora. It follows the guidelines laid out in [5], which discusses how to adapt the original SLPA system of Johnson and Liddell ([1], [2], [3], [4]) for computer use. Specifically, this involves standardizing each annotation to a pre-set template of 34 "slots," each of which encodes a pre-defined aspect of the handshape configuration.…”

Section: Basic Structurementioning

confidence: 99%

“…[ Figure 2. Template for SLPAnnotator: (1) forearm, (2) thumb configuration, (3) thumb-finger contact, (4) index finger, (5) middle finger, (6) ring finger, (7) pinky finger.…”

Section: Basic Structurementioning

confidence: 99%

SLPAnnotator: Tools for Implementing Sign Language Phonetic Annotation

Hall

Mackie²,

Fry

et al. 2017

Interspeech 2017

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This paper introduces a new resource for building phonetically transcribed corpora of signed languages. The free, open-source software tool, SLPAnnotator, is designed to facilitate the transcription of hand configurations using a slightly modified version of the Sign Language Phonetic Annotation (SLPA) system ([1], [2], [3], [4]; see also [5]). While the SLPA system is extremely phonetically detailed, it can be seen as cumbersome and, perhaps, harder for humans to use and interpret than other transcription systems (e.g. Prosodic Model Handshape Coding, [6]). SLPAnnotator is designed to bridge the gap between such systems by automating some of the transcription process, providing users with informative references about possible configurations as they are coding, giving continuously updatable access to a visual model of the transcribed handshape, and allowing users to verify that transcribed handshapes are both phonologically and anatomically plausible. Finally, SLPAnnotator is designed to interface with other analysis tools, such as Phonological CorpusTools ([7], [8]), to allow for subsequent phonological analysis of the resulting sign language corpora.

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“…The SLPA phonetic coding is thus exhaustive but its exhaustiveness makes it a complex system, hard to use in practice. A more user-friendly version of the SLPA could be defined by reducing the number of degrees of freedom and introducing anatomical knowledge to eliminate anatomically impossible hand configurations [40].…”

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confidence: 99%