A platform-independent user-friendly dictionary from Italian to LIS

The Lack of written representation for Italian Sign Language (LIS) makes it difficult to do perform tasks like looking up a new word in a dictionary. Most of the paper dictionaries show LIS signs in drawings or pictures. It’s not a simple proposition to understand the meaning of sign from paper dictionaries unless one already knows the meanings. This paper presents the LIS dictionary which provides the facility to translate Italian text into sign language. LIS signs are shown as video animations performed by a virtual character. The LIS dictionary provides the integration with MultiWordNet database. The integration with MultiWordNet allows a rich extension with the meanings and senses of the words existing in MultiWordNet. The dictionary allows users to acquire information about lemmas, synonyms and synsets in the Sign Language (SL). The application is platform independent and can be used on any operating system. The results of input lemmas are displayed in groups of grammatical categories.