Lexical resources for sign language synthesis: The translation of Dutch to Sign Language of the Netherlands
Temas
Detalles
Deaf people oftentimes have no choice but to communicate in the lingua franca of their country, despite the fact that this is a second language for them. Their ability to read and write is significantly worse than that of a hearing person. Additionally, if a deaf child is born into a family of hearing parents, it is vital that the parents communicate with the child through sign language as soon as possible, otherwise the language region of that child's brain will be underdeveloped. There are currently few resources available for people to learn Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT). A tool that makes this possible would be invaluable to those who need it. This thesis investigates what components are necessary to build a system that uses an avatar to translate a Dutch sentence to NGT. On the basis of the workings of NGT and previous research on the matter, three main components are devised and implemented: software for sign language synthesis, lexical resources for encoding signs, and grammatical resources for structuring sentences. Results show a proof of concept with a corpus of 2226 signs, the ability to make correct use of classifiers, and the abilities to fingerspell any word that is not in the corpus and convey numbers correctly. However, the corpus contains a number of errors and of which manual errors and unnatural mouth signs should particularly be improved. Moreover, further research is necessary to improve the comprehensibility of signs.