This article describes a first version of a system for translating speech into Spanish Sign Language. The system proposed is made up of 4 modules: speech recognizer, semantic analysis, gesture sequence generation and gesture playing. For the speech recognizer and the semantic analysis, we use modules developed by IBM and the University of Colorado respectively. The gesture sequence generation u...

We present a new platform, “Regulus Lite”, which supports rapid development and web deployment of several types of phrasal speech translation systems using a minimal formalism. A distinguishing feature is that most development work can be performed directly by domain experts. We motivate the need for platforms of this type and discuss three specific cases: medical speech translation, speech-to-...

Speech-sign or "bimodal" bilingualism is exceptional because distinct modalities allow for simultaneous production of two languages. We investigated the ramifications of this phenomenon for models of language production by eliciting language mixing from eleven hearing native users of American Sign Language (ASL) and English. Instead of switching between languages, bilinguals frequently produced...

The SignSpeak project will be the first step to approach sign language recognition and translation at levels already obtained in similar technologies such as automatic speech recognition or statistical machine translation of spoken languages. Deaf communities revolve around sign languages as they are their natural means of communication. Although deaf, hard of hearing and hearing signers can co...

Much work has been done in building systems that can recognise gestures, e.g. as a component of sign language recognition systems. These systems typically use whole gestures as the smallest unit for recognition. Although high recognition rates have been reported, these systems do not scale well and are computationally intensive. The reason why these systems generally scale poorly is that they r...

This diploma thesis investigates appearance-based features for the person-independent vision-based recognition of continuous sign language. A large variety of methods which have been successfully used for automatic speech recognition is applied to this task. Appearance-based approaches do not rely on a segmentation of the images or on predefined models of the image content and use the image its...