EASIER was a Horizon 2020 project established with the aim to design, develop, and validate a complete multilingual machine translation system which would act as a framework for barrier-free communication among deaf and hearing individuals, as well as provide a platform to support sign language content creation.
The project concept was based on a unique combination of technological sign language resources and sign language linguistics expertise, allowing for exploitation of a robust data-driven sign language recognition engine, the incorporation of a signing avatar that integrates sign language grammar and prosody features to perform the most advanced synthetic signing currently available, as well as the state-of-the-art machine translation technology that consumes both annotated and unannotated data to deal with a wide range of use scenarios.
EASIER completed its 3-year runtime on December 31, 2023, and held the final review by the European Commission, which formally ended the project on February 29, 2024. Leveraging the multidisciplinary expertise of its project partners and invaluable feedback provided by deaf communities, EASIER managed to achieve significant progress in enhancing the translation framework and reducing communication barriers. You can read more about the project results, here.
| Project Acronym: | EASIER |
| Project Name: | Intelligent Automatic Sign Language Translation |
| Grant Agreement number: | 101016982 |
| Type of action: | Research and Innovation Action (RIA) |
| Topic: | ICT-57-2020 – An empowering, inclusive Next Generation Internet |
| EU grant: | €3 991 591,25 |
| Starting Date: | January 1, 2021 |
| Duration: | 36 months (January 2021 – December 2023) |