Language Resources for Spanish - Spanish Sign Language (LSE) translation

This paper describes the development of a Spanish-Spanish Sign Language (LSE) translation system. Firstly, it describes the first Spanish-Spanish Sign Language (LSE) parallel corpus focused on two specific domains: the renewal of the Identity Document and Driver’s License. This corpus includes more than 4,000 Spanish sentences (in these domains), their LSE translation and a video for each LSE sentence with the sign language representation. This corpus also contains more than 700 sign descriptions in several sign-writing specifications. The translation system developed with this corpus consists of two modules: a Spanish into LSE translation module that is composed of a speech recognizer (for decoding the spoken utterance into a word sequence), a natural language translator (for converting a word sequence into a sequence of signs) and a 3D avatar animation module (for playing back the signs). The second module is a Spanish generator from LSE made up of a visual interface (for specifying a sequence of signs in sign-writing), a language translator (for generating the sequence of words in Spanish) and a text to speech converter. For each language translation, the system uses three technologies: an example-based strategy, a rule-based translation method and a statistical translator.