Sign Search and Sign Synthesis Made Easy to End User: The Paradigm of Building a SL Oriented Interface for Accessing and Managing Educational Content

Sign Language Technologies and the Critical Role of SL Resources in View of Future Internet Accessibility Services

“…To this end, research has focused on incorporating principle SL articulation features in avatar signing [17][18][19], exploiting input from SL theoretical linguistic analysis and, nowadays, SL corpus-based data ( Figure 3). The specifications and special characteristics of the set of tools and resources, which enable content accessibility and user interaction via SL in the platforms presented here as proof of concept use cases, are extensively reported in [20].…”

“…The tools mentioned in [20] for the handling of lexical items met in Greek written text, are part of the ILSP language tool suite [21], being subject to constant maintenance and improvement. Language technology tools are necessary for the implementation of the showcased accessibility tools, since vocal languages such as Modern Greek (MG), used for demonstration purposes of the proposed implementation, exhibit a highly inflected morphological system, causing the reference form of a lemma to partially or completely change, according to different syntactic patterns.…”

“…The bilingual dictionary look-up and the synthetic signing environment are both fed by appropriate language resources incorporating: (i) a bilingual electronic dictionary, the various connections of which are described in more detail in subsection (3.1) next, and (ii) a monolingual GSL lexicon dataset, incorporating transcriptions of lemmas according to the HamNoSys notation, especially developed to feed dynamic synthesis of signed utterances in GSL. The specifications and special characteristics of the set of tools and resources, which enable content accessibility and user interaction via SL in the platforms presented here as proof of concept use cases, are extensively reported in [20].…”

“…While browsing through any digital text, educational or informative, uploaded on a supported for SL accessibility websites, deaf or HoH GSL signers may seek explanation in GSL for any word appearing in the text. The selected "unknown" word is checked against the system's lexicon of signs using any of the methods described in [20] to enter a specific query. The unknown word is looked up in the database of correspondences between written MG lemmas and the respective GSL sign and, if identified, users are presented with information regarding the video lemma representation in GSL, examples of use, synonyms ( Figure 10) linked to senses, or expressions linked to lemmas.…”

“…Moreover, as one of the languages in this dictionary is an oral/written one, while the other is a three-dimensional language, the problem of equivalence proved to be even more challenging than in the case of language pairs of similar modalities (oral or signed). using any of the methods described in [20] to enter a specific query. The unknown word is looked up in the database of correspondences between written MG lemmas and the respective GSL sign and, if identified, users are presented with information regarding the video lemma representation in GSL, examples of use, synonyms ( Figure 10) linked to senses, or expressions linked to lemmas.…”