A Machine Translation System from English to American Sign Language

Research in computational linguistics, computer graphics and autonomous agents has led to the development of increasingly sophisticated communicative agents over the past few years, bringing new perspective to machine translation research. The engineering of language-based smooth, expressive, natural-looking human gestures can give us useful insights into the design principles that have evolved in natural communication between people. In this paper we prototype a machine translation system from English to American Sign Language (ASL), taking into account not only linguistic but also visual and spatial information associated with ASL signs. Comments Postprint version. Published in Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 1934, Envisioning Machine Translation in the Information Future 4th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas, 2000, pages 54-67. Publisher URL: http://www.springerlink.com/content/5d0gl1menac989rk/ Author(s) Liwei Zhao, Karin Kipper, William Schuler, Christian Vogler, Martha Palmer, and Norman I. Badler This conference paper is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/hms/109 A Machine Translation System from English to American Sign Language Liwei Zhao, Karin Kipper, William Schuler, Christian Vogler, Norman Badler, and Martha Palmer Department of Computer and Information Science University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia PA 19104-6389 USA {lwzhao,kipper,schuler,cvogler,badler,mpalmer}@graphics.cis.upenn.edu Abstract. Research in computational linguistics, computer graphics and autonomous agents has led to the development of increasingly sophisticated communicative agents over the past few years, bringing new perspective to machine translation research. The engineering of languagebased smooth, expressive, natural-looking human gestures can give us useful insights into the design principles that have evolved in natural communication between people. In this paper we prototype a machine translation system from English to American Sign Language (ASL), taking into account not only linguistic but also visual and spatial information associated with ASL signs. Research in computational linguistics, computer graphics and autonomous agents has led to the development of increasingly sophisticated communicative agents over the past few years, bringing new perspective to machine translation research. The engineering of languagebased smooth, expressive, natural-looking human gestures can give us useful insights into the design principles that have evolved in natural communication between people. In this paper we prototype a machine translation system from English to American Sign Language (ASL), taking into account not only linguistic but also visual and spatial information associated with ASL signs.