CSLML: a markup language for expressive Chinese sign language synthesis

This paper presents a Chinese Sign Language Markup Language (CSLML), which is developed for expressive Chinese sign language synthesis by introducing features and structure of sign language prosody. The tags of CSLML are divided into two levels: function level and phonetic level. Function level provides abstract information about signed content and prosody, so it facilitates text annotating for text-driven automatic synthetic system and adapts to diversified synthetic methods, such as motion capture animation or image-based synthesis, which may not be good at processing lower-level information. Phonetic level provides detailed behavioral manners based on phonetics and phonology to interpret the meaning in function level. It facilitates creation and edit of any motions. The two levels co-exist in CSLML documents and high-level description can be mapped into corresponding low-level behavior to provide one-to-many variability and expression of synthesis. Therefore, we also introduce a framework for this mapping processing and exhibit results of our animated prototype system based on this framework. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.