SemSignWriting: A Proposed Semantic System for Arabic Text-to-SignWriting Translation

Arabic Sign Language (ArSL) is the native language for the Arab deaf community. ArSL allows deaf people to communicate among themselves and with non-deaf people around them to express their needs, thoughts and feelings. Opposite to spoken languages, Sign Language (SL) depends on hands and facial expression to express the thought instead of sounds. In recent years, interest in translating sign language automatically for different languages has increased. However, a small set of these works are specialized in ArSL. Basically, these works translate word by word without taking care of the semantics of the translated sentence or the translation rules of Arabic text to Arabic sign language. In this paper we present a proposed system for semantically translating Arabic text to Arabic SignWriting in the jurisprudence of prayer domain. The system is designed to translate Arabic text by applying Arabic Sign Language (ArSL) grammatical rules as well as semantically looking up the words in domain ontology. The results of qualitatively evaluating the system based on a SignWriting expert judgment proved the correctness of the translation results.