A paper titled “Sign Language Avatars: A Question of Representation,” developed within the framework of EASIER has been published in MDPI’s Information journal as part of the Special Issue Frontiers in Machine Translation.
The paper authored by Rosalee Wolfe, John C. McDonald, Thomas Hanke, Sarah Ebling, Davy Van Landuyt, Frankie Picron, Verena Krausneker, Eleni Efthimiou, Evita Fotinea, and Annelies Braffort provides an overview of the unique aspects of signed languages, surveys the technology underlying avatars, and performs an in-depth analysis of the
features in a textual representation for avatar display.
Abstract
Given the achievements in automatically translating text from one language to another, one would expect to see similar advancements in translating between signed and spoken languages. However, progress in this effort has lagged in comparison. Typically, machine translation consists of processing text from one language to produce text in another. Because signed languages have no generally-accepted written form, translating spoken to signed language requires the additional step of displaying the language visually as animation through the use of a three-dimensional (3D) virtual human commonly known as an avatar. Researchers have been grappling with this problem for over twenty years, and it is still an open question. With the goal of developing a deeper understanding of the challenges posed by this question, this article gives a summary overview of the unique aspects of signed languages, briefly surveys the technology underlying avatars and performs an in-depth analysis of the features in a textual representation for avatar display. It concludes with a comparison of these features and makes observations about future research directions.
The full version of the paper is freely accessible online.
