Automatic Translation of English Text to Indian Sign Language Synthetic Animations

This article presents the prototype for English Text to Indian Sign Language conversion system using synthetic animations in real domain. The translation system consists of parsing module which parses the input English sentence to phrase structure grammar representation on which Indian sign language grammar rules are applied to reorder the words of the English sentence (as the grammar of English language and Indian sign language is different). Elimination module eliminates the unwanted words from the reordered sentence. Lemmatization is applied to convert the words into the root form as the Indian sign language does not use the inflections of the words. All the words of the sentence are then checked into lexicon which contains the English word with its HamNoSys notation and the words that are not in the lexicon are replaced by their synonym. The words of the sentence are replaced by their counter HamNoSys code. In case the word is not present in the lexicon, HamNoSys code will be taken for each alphabet of the word. The HamNoSys code is converted into the SiGML tags and this SiGML tags are sent to animation module which converts the SiGML code into the synthetic animation using avatar. The proposed system is innovative as the existing working systems uses videos rather than synthetic animations. Even the existing systems are limited to conversion of words and predefined sentences into Indian sign language whereas our proposed system converts the English sentences into Indian sign language in real domain.