INGIT: Limited Domain Formulaic Translation from Hindi Strings to Indian Sign Language

We report a cross-modal translation system from Hindi strings to Indian Sign Language (ISL) for possible use in the Indian Railways reservation counters. INGIT adopts a semantically mediated formulaic framework for Hindi-ISL mapping. An in-depth investigation into the structure of ISL forms the groundwork for INGIT. Some representational and mapping issues concerning cross-modal translation are identified and an implementation design is evolved. We adopt the Construction Grammar approach for handling formulaic inputs in terms of a construction lexicon with single constituents as well as larger phrases, with direct semantic mappings at each level. We present results based on a small corpus collected at a railway counter, for which translations were validated from native ISL signers. The work builds upon a semantic module worked out for Hindi and ISL.