Speech perception in field of phonetics is widely studied with behavioural testing based on the notion of categorical perception. Recently signed languages are also being studied within phonetic framework. The experimental design presented within this research project aims for analogous study design parameters for both speech and sign.

One of the biggest difficulties in automatic speech recognition (ASR) is how to deal with variations of speech signals caused by non-linguistic information, such as age, gender, etc. Various methods have been proposed to compensate for the variations and one of them is speech structure [1]. Speech structure, which extracts only contrastive features and discards absolute features, is proved to b...

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...

In sign language research, technically it has been possible to investigate prominence around a unit of sign movements that realizes strong visual impression. Based on the researches of speech prominence, this study proposes techniques to delimit a sequential hand-movement into small units, and investigates the prominence by the comparisons of physical properties on each unit between emphasized ...

The production of sign language involves two large articulators (the hands) moving through space and contacting the body. In contrast, speech production requires small movements of the tongue and vocal tract with no observable spatial contrasts. Nonetheless, both language types exhibit a sublexical layer of structure with similar properties (e.g., segments, syllables, feature hierarchies). To i...

We propose best practices for gloss annotation of sign languages taking into account the needs of data-driven approaches to recognition and translation of natural languages. Furthermore, we provide reference numbers for several technical aspects for the creation of new sign language data collections. Most available sign language data collections are of limited use to data-driven approaches, bec...

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-...

This paper presents the SAILSE Project (Sistema Avanzado de Información en Lengua de Signos Española – Spanish Sign Language Advanced Information System). This project aims to develop an interactive system for facilitating the communication between a hearing and a deaf person. The first step has been the linguistic study, including a sentence collection, its translation into LSE (Lengua de Sign...

Hidden Markov models (HMM’s) have been used prominently and successfully in speech recognition and, more recently, in handwriting recognition. Consequently, they seem ideal f o r visual recognition of complex, structured hand gestures such as are found in sign language. We describe a real-time HMM-based system for recognizing sentence level American Sign Language (ASL) which attains a word accu...