Translating Italian connectives into Italian Sign Language

We present a corpus analysis of how Italian connectives are translated into LIS, the Italian Sign Language. Since corpus resources are scarce, we propose an alignment method between the syntactic trees of the Italian sentence and of its LIS translation. This method, and clustering applied to its outputs, highlight the different ways a connective can be rendered in LIS: with a corresponding sign, by affecting the location or shape of other signs, or being omitted altogether. We translate these findings into a computational model that will be integrated into the pipeline of an existing Italian-LIS rendering system. Initial experiments to learn the four possible translations with Decision Trees give promising results.