A Survey and Critique of American Sign Language Natural Language Generation and Machine Translation Systems

Abstract

2 The Problem of ASL Generation 3 The Linguistics of American Sign Language 3 The Concept of Animated Avatars 4 A Language without a Writing System 5 Motivations and Applications 6 Brief Introduction to the Systems Under Consideration 6 ViSiCAST Translator 7 ZARDOZ 7 ASL Workbench 8 TEAM Project 8 Thematic Critique and Comparison of the Systems 9 Underlying Machine Translation Architecture 10 Coverage, Specificity, and Development Time 14 ASL Grammar Formalism and Generation Approach 16 Expressiveness of ASL Representations 18 The Animation Output 20 Classifier Predicates and the Use of Three-Dimensional Space 22 Sign Lexicon Specification 24 Degree of User Intervention Needed for Translation 26 Greatest Strengths of the Four Systems 27 ZARDOZ and the Use of Reasoning During Translation 27 Workbench and the Model of ASL Phonology 28 ViSiCAST and the Discourse Representation Structures 29 TEAM and the EMOTE Motion Parameterization 30 Conclusion 32 New Directions 33 References 35