Paper title : Design , Development and Field Evaluation of a Spanish into Sign Language Translation System

This paper describes the design, development and field evaluation of a Spanish into Spanish Sign Language (LSE: Lengua de Signos Española) translation system. The developed system is focused on helping Deaf people when they want to renew their Driver’s License. The system is composed of a speech recognizer (for decoding the spoken utterance into a word sequence), a natural language translator (for converting a word sequence into a sequence of signs belonging to the sign language), and a 3D avatar animation module (for playing back the signs). For the natural language translator, three technological proposals have been implemented and evaluated: an example-based strategy, a rule-based translation method and a statistical translator. For the final version, the implemented language translator combines all the alternatives in a hierarchical structure. This paper includes a detailed description of the field evaluation carried out. This evaluation has been performed in the Local Traffic Office in Toledo including real government employees, and Deaf people from Madrid and Toledo. The evaluation includes objective measures from the system and subjective information from questionnaires. The paper reports a detailed analysis of the main problems found and a discussion about how to solve them (some of them specific for Spanish Sign Language).