Educational resources and implementation of a Greek sign language synthesis architecture

In this paper we present the creation and presentation of dynamic linguistic resources of Greek Sign Language (GSL). The resources feed the development of an educational multitask platform within the SYNENNOESE project for the teaching of GSL. The platform 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. In SYNENNOESE, the input is written Greek text from early elementary school textbooks, which is transformed into GSL and animated on screen. A syntactic parser decodes the structural patterns of written Greek and matches them into equivalent patterns in GSL, which are then signed by a VC. The adopted notation system for the lexical database is HamNoSys (Hamburg Notation System). 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.