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Sinander, Pierre, and Tomas Issa. "Sign Language Translation." Thesis, KTH, Mekatronik, 2021. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-296169.
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The purpose of the thesis was to create a data glove that can translate ASL by reading the finger- and hand movements. Furthermore, the applicability of conductive fabric as stretch sensors was explored. To read the hand gestures stretch sensors constructed from conductive fabric were attached to each finger of the glove to distinguish how much they were bent. The hand movements were registered using a 3-axis accelerometer which was mounted on the glove. The sensor values were read by an Arduino Nano 33 IoT mounted to the wrist of the glove which processed the readings and translated them into the corresponding sign. The microcontroller would then wirelessly transmit the result to another device through Bluetooth Low Energy. The glove was able to correctly translate all the signs of the ASL alphabet with an average accuracy of 93%. It was found that signs with small differences in hand gestures such as S and T were harder to distinguish between which would result in an accuracy of 70% for these specific signs.<br>Syftet med uppsatsen var att skapa en datahandske som kan översätta ASL genom att läsa av finger- och handrörelser. Vidare undersöktes om ledande tyg kan användas som sträcksensorer. För att läsa av handgesterna fästes ledande tyg på varje finger på handsken för att urskilja hur mycket de böjdes. Handrörelserna registrerades med en 3-axlig accelerometer som var monterad på handsken. Sensorvärdena lästes av en Arduino Nano 33 IoT monterad på handleden som översatte till de motsvarande tecknen. Mikrokontrollern överförde sedan resultatet trådlöst till en annan enhet via Bluetooth Low Energy. Handsken kunde korrekt översätta alla tecken på ASL-alfabetet med en genomsnittlig exakthet på 93%. Det visade sig att tecken med små skillnader i handgester som S och T var svårare att skilja mellan vilket resulterade i en noggrannhet på 70% för dessa specifika tecken.
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Eichmann, Hanna. ""Hands off our language!" : deaf sign language teachers' perspectives on sign language standardisation." Thesis, University of Central Lancashire, 2008. http://clok.uclan.ac.uk/21824/.
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In light of the absence of codified standard varieties of British Sign Language (BSL) and German Sign Language (Deutsche Gebclrdensprache, DGS), there have been repeated calls for the standardisation of both languages primarily from outside the deaf communities. The development of standard varieties has been suggested to facilitate political recognition and the establishment of linguistic norms which could enable sign language users to gain equal access to education, administration and commerce. Although frequently labelled as sociolinguistic enquiry, much research in standardisation and language planning displays a certain preference for investigating the linguistic aspects of language. Explicit discussion of social-theoretical perspectives is scarce. In order to address this imbalance, this study focuses on the social aspect of the subject matter by investigating the concept of sign language standardisation from the perspective of deaf sign language teachers. Taking a comparative approach, research findings are based on 17 in-depth interviews conducted in Germany and the UK which were analysed drawing on grounded theory. Participants in both countries conceptualised sign language standardisation predominantly as externally imposed language change pertaining to the eradication of regional dialects. Given that in contrast to hearing learners of sign languages, participants did not regard regional variation as a problem but as a highly valued feature of BSL and DGS, sign language standardisation was seen as a threat to sign languages. Moreover, the subject matter was also perceived as embodying hearing people's hegemony by bringing to the fore traditional power imbalances between deaf people and hearing stake holders in the political and educational realms. This study is the first to explore and examine perceptions of and attitudes towards sign language standardisation in the UK and Germany. It thereby contributes to knowledge in respect to sign language sociolinguistics, as well as standardisation and language planning in the wider field. Moreover, taking an explicitly sociolinguistic approach and in drawing on social research methodology, this study offers an atypical perspective on the issue of language standardisation in general.
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Santoro, Mirko. "Compounds in sign languages : the case of Italian and French Sign Language." Thesis, Paris Sciences et Lettres (ComUE), 2018. http://www.theses.fr/2018PSLEH204.
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Dans cette thèse, j’étudie le domaine des mots composés dans les langues des signes. La composition a été décrite comme étant une stratégie d’enrichissement du lexique des langues des signes, même dans des cas de langues des signes émergentes. J’aborde ce sujet au travers de trois approches principales : typologique/empirique, théorique et expérimentale.Dans la partie typologique/empirique, j’apporte une description approfondie des mots composés dans deux langues signées : la LIS et la LSF. Dans ce domaine, ma principale contribution est de proposer une typologie plus exhaustive des classificateurs en y incluant les formes simultanées.Dans la partie théorique, j’apporte une description formelle de la manière de dériver la typologie complète des mots composés présents dans ces deux langues.Mon objectif premier est de montrer que les mots composés peuvent être dérivés de différentes manières selon leurs propriétés, et que la dérivation morpho-syntaxique n’est pas le seul processus qui affecte les options combinatoires de composition. Les processus post-syntaxiques, et particulièrement la linéarisation, doivent avoir au minimum accès à des représentations partielles afin de distinguer les formes qui doivent être épelées de façon séquentielle et simultanée.Dans la partie expérimentale, je cherche à savoir si la réduction phonologique est une condition suffisante pour identifier les mots composés dans les langues signées. Ma principale contribution a été de montrer que l’importation des critères d’une langue des signes à une autre doit être réalisée avec une extrême précaution<br>In this dissertation, I investigate the domain of compounds in sign languages. Compounding has been documented as a key strategy to enrich the lexicon of sign languages even in situations of emergent sign languages. I address this topic with three main angles: typological/empirical, theoretical and experimental. In the typological/empirical part, I offer a thorough description of compounds in two sign languages: Italian and French Sign Language (LIS and LSF). I offer a refined and more comprehensive typology of compounds, in which classifiers and simultaneous forms are also taken into account.In the theoretical part, I provide a formal account of how to derive the whole typology of compounds found in LIS and LSF. I show i) that compounds can be derived in multiple ways depending on their morphosyntactic properties and ii) that morphosyntactic derivation is not the only process that affects the combinatorial options of compounding. Post-syntactic processes, especially linearization, have to have access to at least partial representations in order to distinguish between forms that have to be spelled out either sequentially or simultaneously.In the experimental part, I investigate whether phonological reduction is a sufficient condition to identify compounds in SL. I show that importing criteria from one SL to another can be done, but with extreme caution
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Ann, Jean. "Against [lateral]: Evidence from Chinese Sign Language and American Sign Language." Department of Linguistics, University of Arizona (Tucson, AZ), 1990. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/227260.
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American Sign Language (ASL) signs are claimed to be composed of four parameters: handshape, location, movement (Sto]çoe 1960) and palm orientation (Battison 1974). This paper focuses solely on handshape, that is, the configuration of the thumb and the fingers in a given sign. Handshape is significant in ASL and Chinese Sign Language (CSL); that is, minimal pairs exist for handshape in each. Thus, the two ASL signs in (1) differ in one parameter: the handshapes are different, but the location, palm orientation and movement are the same. Similarly, the two CSL signs in (2) differ in one parameter: handshape. A logical next question asks if handshapes are further divisible into parts; more specifically, are handshapes composed of distinctive features? This question is not new; in fact, researchers have made many proposals for ASL handshape features (Lane, Boyes -Braem and Bellugi, 1979; Mandel, 1981; Liddell and Johnson, 1985; Sandler, 1989; Corina and Sagey, 1988 and others). This paper focuses on the proposal of Corina and Sagey (1988). In Section 2, I outline the proposed system for the distinctive handshapes of ASL, of which [lateral] is a part. Then using data from ASL and CSL, I give three arguments in support of the claim that there is not sufficient justification in ASL or CSL for the feature [lateral]. First, I show in Section 3 that the prediction which follows from the claim that [lateral] applies only to the thumb, namely that the thumb behaves differently from the other fingers, is not borne out by CSL data. Second, I argue in Section 4 that since other features (proposed by Corina and Sagey, 1988) can derive the same phonetic effects as [lateral], [lateral] is unnecessary to describe thumb features in either ASL or CSL. Third, in Section 5, I use ASL and CSL data to argue that the notion of fingers as "specified" or "unspecified ", although intuitively pleasing, should be discarded. If this notion cannot be used, the feature [lateral] does not uniquely identify a particular set of handshapes. I show that CSL data suggests that two other features, [contact to palm] and [contact to thumb] are independently needed. With these two features, and the exclusion of [lateral], the handshapes of both ASL and CSL can be explained. In Section 6, the arguments against [lateral] are summarized.
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Fekete, Emily. "SIGNS IN SPACE: AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE AS SPATIAL LANGUAGE AND CULTURAL WORLDVIEW." Kent State University / OhioLINK, 2010. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent1279060612.
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Eichmann, Hanna [Verfasser]. "''Hands off our language!'' : Deaf sign language teachers' perspectives on sign language standardisation / Hanna Eichmann." Aachen : Shaker, 2013. http://d-nb.info/1051572126/34.
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Xu, Wang. "A Comparison of Chinese and Taiwan Sign Languages: Towards a New Model for Sign Language Comparison." The Ohio State University, 2006. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1363617703.
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Herman, Rosalind. "Assessing British sign language development." Thesis, City University London, 2002. http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/8446/.
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Sign bilingualism is one of several approaches to the education of deaf children in the UK Sign bilingualism seeks to introduce British Sign Language (BSL) to deaf children from an early age in order to establish a first language from which English, the majority language, can be acquired. However, there is little concensus on how deaf children's BSL development should be measured and no practical tools available to assist practitioners in this task. BSL assessments are needed to make baseline assessments, facilitate identification of language difficulties, indicate targets for remediation and evaluate the outcome of educational and therapy programmes for deaf children. This study describes the development of an assessment of British Sign Language development. Issues relating to the type of test required and which aspects of BSL to include are raised. Selection of subjects upon whom to base test development and standardisation are discussed. The BSL test of receptive grammar was initially piloted on 40 children from native signing backgrounds. Revisions were made to the test procedure and a number of unsuccessful items were eliminated prior to standardising the test on 135 children aged 3-13 years. Subjects were carefully selected from the wider population of deaf children as being those who were in optimal language learning contexts. Although this may be considered a small sample for standardising a test, it reflects a high proportion of the population of children who are developing BSL under ideal conditions. Following publication of the test, analysis of data from its use with a larger unselected sample of deaf children allowed comparisons to be made with those in the standardisation study. The results provide insights into the conditions under which deaf children may acquire BSL naturally, even when BSL is not the home language. Areas explored by the study include the comparative language acquisition paths, as measured by the test, of deaf and hearing children from deaf families and deaf children from hearing families with diverse experiences of BSL input.
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Bull, Hannah. "Learning sign language from subtitles." Electronic Thesis or Diss., université Paris-Saclay, 2023. http://www.theses.fr/2023UPASG013.
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Les langues des signes sont un moyen de communication essentiel pour les communautés sourdes. Elles sont des langues visuo-gestuelles, qui utilisent comme modalités les mains, les expressions faciales, le regard et les mouvements du corps. Elles ont des structures grammaticales complexes et des lexiques riches qui sont considérablement différents de ceux que l'on trouve dans les langues parlées. Les spécificités des langues des signes en termes de canaux de communication, de structure et de grammaire exigent des méthodologies distinctes. Les performances des systèmes de traduction automatique entre des langues écrites ou parlées sont actuellement suffisantes pour de nombreux cas d'utilisation quotidienne, tels que la traduction de vidéos, de sites web, d'e-mails et de documents. En revanche, les systèmes de traduction automatique pour les langues des signes n'existent pas en dehors de cas d'utilisation très spécifiques avec un vocabulaire limité. La traduction automatique de langues des signes est un défi pour deux raisons principales. Premièrement, les langues des signes sont des langues à faibles ressources avec peu de données d'entraînement disponibles. Deuxièmement, les langues des signes sont des langues visuelles et spatiales sans forme écrite, naturellement représentées sous forme de vidéo plutôt que d'audio ou de texte. Pour relever le premier défi, nous fournissons de grands corpus de données pour l'entraînement et l'évaluation des systèmes de traduction automatique en langue des signes, avec des contenus vidéo en langue des signes interprétée et originale, ainsi que des sous-titres écrits. Alors que les données interprétées nous permettent de collecter un grand nombre d'heures de vidéos, les vidéos originalement en langue des signes sont plus représentatives de l'utilisation de la langue des signes au sein des communautés sourdes. Les sous-titres écrits peuvent être utilisés comme supervision faible pour diverses tâches de compréhension de la langue des signes. Pour relever le deuxième défi, cette thèse propose des méthodes permettant de mieux comprendre les vidéos en langue des signes. Alors que la segmentation des phrases est généralement triviale pour les langues écrites, la segmentation des vidéos en langue des signes en phrases repose sur la détection d'indices sémantiques et prosodiques subtils dans les vidéos. Nous utilisons des indices prosodiques pour apprendre à segmenter automatiquement une vidéo en langue des signes en unités de type phrase, déterminées par les limites des sous-titres. En développant cette méthode de segmentation, nous apprenons ensuite à aligner les sous-titres du texte sur les segments de la vidéo en langue des signes en utilisant des indices sémantiques et prosodiques, afin de créer des paires au niveau de la phrase entre la vidéo en langue des signes et le texte. Cette tâche est particulièrement importante pour les données interprétées, où les sous-titres sont généralement alignés sur l'audio et non sur la langue des signes. En utilisant ces paires vidéo-texte alignées automatiquement, nous développons et améliorons plusieurs méthodes différentes pour annoter de façon dense les signes lexicaux en interrogeant des mots dans le texte des sous-titres et en recherchant des indices visuels dans la vidéo en langue des signes pour les signes correspondants<br>Sign languages are an essential means of communication for deaf communities. Sign languages are visuo-gestual languages using the modalities of hand gestures, facial expressions, gaze and body movements. They possess rich grammar structures and lexicons that differ considerably from those found among spoken languages. The uniqueness of transmission medium, structure and grammar of sign languages requires distinct methodologies. The performance of automatic translations systems between high-resource written languages or spoken languages is currently sufficient for many daily use cases, such as translating videos, websites, emails and documents. On the other hand, automatic translation systems for sign languages do not exist outside of very specific use cases with limited vocabulary. Automatic sign language translation is challenging for two main reasons. Firstly, sign languages are low-resource languages with little available training data. Secondly, sign languages are visual-spatial languages with no written form, naturally represented as video rather than audio or text. To tackle the first challenge, we contribute large datasets for training and evaluating automatic sign language translation systems with both interpreted and original sign language video content, as well as written text subtitles. Whilst interpreted data allows us to collect large numbers of hours of videos, original sign language video is more representative of sign language usage within deaf communities. Written subtitles can be used as weak supervision for various sign language understanding tasks. To address the second challenge, we develop methods to better understand visual cues from sign language video. Whilst sentence segmentation is mostly trivial for written languages, segmenting sign language video into sentence-like units relies on detecting subtle semantic and prosodic cues from sign language video. We use prosodic cues to learn to automatically segment sign language video into sentence-like units, determined by subtitle boundaries. Expanding upon this segmentation method, we then learn to align text subtitles to sign language video segments using both semantic and prosodic cues, in order to create sentence-level pairs between sign language video and text. This task is particularly important for interpreted TV data, where subtitles are generally aligned to the audio and not to the signing. Using these automatically aligned video-text pairs, we develop and improve multiple different methods to densely annotate lexical signs by querying words in the subtitle text and searching for visual cues in the sign language video for the corresponding signs
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Holzrichter, Amanda Sue. "A crosslinguistic study of child-directed signing : American Sign Language and sign language of Spain /." Digital version accessible at:, 2000. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/utexas/main.
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Moemedi, Kgatlhego Aretha. "Rendering an avatar from sign writing notation for sign language animation." Thesis, University of the Western Cape, 2010. http://etd.uwc.ac.za/index.php?module=etd&action=viewtitle&id=gen8Srv25Nme4_9989_1307516277.
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<p>This thesis presents an approach for automatically generating signing animations from a sign language notation. An avatar endowed with expressive gestures, as subtle as changes in facial expression, is used to render the sign language animations. SWML, an XML format of SignWriting is provided as input. It transcribes sign language gestures in a format compatible to virtual signing. Relevant features of sign language gestures are extracted from the SWML. These features are then converted to body animation pa- rameters, which are used to animate the avatar. Using key-frame animation techniques, intermediate key-frames approximate the expected sign language gestures. The avatar then renders the corresponding sign language gestures. These gestures are realistic and aesthetically acceptable and can be recognized and understood by Deaf people.</p>
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Ross, Danielle S. (Danielle Suzanne). "Learning to read with sign language : how beginning deaf readers relate sign language to written words." Thesis, McGill University, 1992. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=22492.
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How deaf children relate signs to written words was investigated. Thirty deaf children participated in a lexical decision task and a production task. On both tasks, the children recognized written words that form part of their sign lexicon more accurately and more quickly than words that do not. In the production task, the younger children made fewer errors on written words that share formational correspondences with their signed equivalents, whereas the older children did not. In the lexical decision task, the children recognized words that they signed correctly in the production task more accurately and more quickly than those words they fingerspelled correctly.<br>These results indicate that deaf children organize their recognition of written words around their knowledge of sign language. Further, the children's responses to legal versus illegal pseudowords in the lexical decision task indicate that they can learn the orthographic rules of written English words.
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Börstell, Carl. "Object marking in the signed modality : Verbal and nominal strategies in Swedish Sign Language and other sign languages." Doctoral thesis, Stockholms universitet, Institutionen för lingvistik, 2017. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-141669.
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In this dissertation, I investigate various aspects of object marking and how these manifest themselves in the signed modality. The main focus is on Swedish Sign Language (SSL), the national sign language of Sweden, which is the topic of investigation in all five studies. Two of the studies adopt a comparative perspective, including other sign languages as well. The studies comprise a range of data, including corpus data, elicited production, and acceptability judgments, and combine quantitative and qualitative methods in the analyses. The dissertation begins with an overview of the topics of valency, argument structure, and object marking, primarily from a spoken language perspective. Here, the interactions between semantics and morphosyntax are presented from a typological perspective, introducing differential object marking as a key concept. With regard to signed language, object marking is discussed in terms of both verbal and nominal strategies. Verbal strategies of object marking among sign languages include directional verbs, object handshape classifiers, and embodied perspective in signing. The first study investigates the use of directionality and object handshapes as object marking strategies in Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL), Israeli Sign Language (ISL), and SSL. It is shown that the strategies generally display different alignments in terms of the types of objects targeted, which is uniform across languages, but that directionality is much more marginal in ABSL than in the other two languages. Also, we see that there is a connection between object marking strategies and the animacy of the object, and that the strategies, object animacy, and word order preferences interact. In the second and third studies, SSL is investigated with regard to the transitive–reflexive distinction. Here, we see that there are interactional effects between object handshapes and the perspective taken by the signer. This points to intricate iconic motivations of combining and structuring complex verb sequences, such as giving preference to agent focusing structures (e.g., agent perspective and handling handshapes). Furthermore, the use of space is identified as a crucial strategy for reference tracking, especially when expressing semantically transitive events. Nominal strategies include object pronouns and derivations of the sign PERSON. The fourth study provides a detailed account of the object pronoun OBJPRO in SSL, which is the first in-depth description of this sign. It is found that the sign is in widespread use in SSL, often corresponds closely to object pronouns of spoken Swedish, and is argued to be grammaticalized from the lexical sign PERSON. In the final study, the possible existence of object pronouns in other sign languages is investigated by using a sample of 24 languages. This analysis reveals that the feature is found mostly in the Nordic countries, suggesting areal contact phenomena. However, the study also shows that there are a number of derivations of PERSON, such as reflexive pronouns, agreement auxiliaries, and case markers. The use of PERSON as a source of grammaticalization for these functions is attributed to both semantic and phonological properties of the sign. This dissertation is unique in that it is dedicated to the topic of object marking in the signed modality. It brings a variety of perspectives and methods together in order to investigate the domain of object marking, cross-linguistically and cross-modally.
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Alba, de la Torre Celia. "Wh-questions in Catalan sign language." Doctoral thesis, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/10803/397751.
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This dissertation offers a characterization and an analysis of wh-questions in Catalan Sign Language, which show the particularity of placing wh-expressions canonically in sentence final position. This feature, specific to Sign Languages, has been difficult to deal with from traditional models, which have often considered that wh-movement is universally to the left and which have also often assumed that syntactic structure encodes information about the linear order of linguistic elements. The dissertation also argues that syntactic hierarchy and linear order are two different objects with a limited impact over one another, and that the latter is mainly dependent on the mechanisms of linguistic processing and, specifically, on Working Memory. In that sense, the hypothesis that the difference in the placing of wh-elements between Sign Languages and Spoken Languages is due to differences in Working Memory is put forwards. To explore it, the results of two experiments with Deaf and hearing participants are discussed.<br>S'ofereix una caracterització i una anàlisi de les preguntes-que en Llengua de Signes Catalana, que presenten la particularitat d'ubicar preferentment les expressions-qu al final de l'oració. Aquesta característica, pròpia de les llengües de signes, ha estat difícil de tractar des de models tradicionals, que sovint han considerat que el moviment-qu és universalment cap a l'esquerra i que sovint han assumit que l'estructura sintàctica codifica informació respecte de l'ordre lineal dels elements lingüístics. Es proposa que la jerarquia sintàctica i l'ordre lineal són dos objectes diferents i amb un impacte limitat l'un sobre l'altre i que el segon depèn principalment de mecanismes de processament lingüístic i, específicament, de la Memòria de Treball. En aquest sentit, s'hipotetitza que la diferència en la ubicació dels elements-qu entre llengües de signes i llengües orals respon a diferències en la Memòria de Treball. Per a explorar aquesta hipòtesi, s'exposen els resultats de dos experiments amb participants Sords i oients.
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Haseeb, Ahmed Abdul, and Asim Ilyas. "Speech Translation into Pakistan Sign Language." Thesis, Blekinge Tekniska Högskola, Sektionen för datavetenskap och kommunikation, 2012. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:bth-5095.
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ABSTRACT Context: Communication is a primary human need and language is the medium for this. Most people have the ability to listen and speak and they use different languages like Swedish, Urdu and English etc. to communicate. Hearing impaired people use signs to communicate. Pakistan Sign Language (PSL) is the preferred language of the deaf in Pakistan. Currently, human PSL interpreters are required to facilitate communication between the deaf and hearing; they are not always available, which means that communication among the deaf and other people may be impaired or nonexistent. In this situation, a system with voice recognition as an input and PSL as an output will be highly helpful. Objectives: As part of this thesis, we explore challenges faced by deaf people in everyday life while interacting with unimpaired. We investigate state of art work done in this area. This study explores speech recognition and Machine translation techniques to devise a generic and automated system that converts English speech to PSL. A prototype of the proposed solution is developed and validated. Methods: Three step investigation is done as part of thesis work. First, to understand problem itself, interviews were conducted with the domain experts. Secondly, from literature review, it is investigated whether any similar or related work has already been done, state of the art technologies like Machine translation, speech recognition engines and Natural language processing etc. have been analyzed. Thirdly, prototype is developed whose validation data is obtained from domain experts and is validated by ourselves as well as from domain experts. Results: It is found that there is a big communication gap between deaf and unimpaired in Pakistan. This is mainly due to the lack of an automated system that can convert Audio speech to PSL and vice versa. After investigating state of the art work including solutions in other countries specific to their languages, it is found that no system exists that is generic and automated. We found that there is already work started for PSL to English Speech conversion but not the other way around. As part of this thesis, we discovered that a generic and automated system can be devised using speech recognition and Machine translation techniques. Conclusion: Deaf people in Pakistan lack a lot of opportunities mainly due to communication gap between deaf and unimpaired. We establish that there should be a generic and automated system that can convert English speech to PSL and vice versa. As part of this, we worked for such a system that can convert English speech to PSL. Moreover, Speech recognition, Machine translation and Natural language processing techniques can be core ingredients for such a generic and automated system. Using user centric approach, the prototype of the system is validated iteratively from domain experts.<br>This research has investigated a computer based solution to facilitate communication among deaf people and unimpaired. Investigation was performed using literature review and visits to institutes to gain a deeper knowledge about sign language and specifically how is it used in Pakistan context. Secondly, challenges faced by deaf people to interact with unimpaired are analyzed by interviews with domain experts (instructors of deaf institutes) and by directly observing deaf in everyday life situations. We conclude that deaf people rely on sign language for communication with unimpaired people. Deaf people in Pakistan use PSL for communication, English is taught as secondary language all over Pakistan in all educational institutes, deaf people are taught by instructors that not only need to know the domain expertise of the area that they are teaching like Math, History and Science etc. but they also need to know PSL very well in order to teach the deaf. It becomes very difficult for deaf institutes to get instructors that know both. Whenever deaf people need to communicate with unimpaired people in any situation, they either need to hire a translator or request the unimpaired people to write everything for them. Translators are very difficult to get all the time and they are very expensive as well. Moreover, using writing by unimpaired becomes very slow process and not all unimpaired people want to do this. We observed this phenomena ourselves as instructors of the institutes provided us the opportunity to work with deaf people to understand their feelings and challenges in everyday life. In this way, we used to go with deaf people in shopping malls, banks, post offices etc. and with their permission, we observed their interaction. We have concluded that sometimes their interaction with normal people becomes very slow and embarrassing. Based on above findings, we concluded that there is definitely a need for an automated system that can facilitate communication between deaf and unimpaired people. These factors lead to the subsequent objective of this research. The main objective of this thesis is to identify a generic and an automated system without any human intervention that converts English speech into PSL as a solution to bridge the communication gap between deaf and unimpaired. It is identified that existing work done related to this problem area doesn’t fulfill our objective. Current solutions are either very specific to a domain, e.g. post office or need human intervention i.e. not automatic. It is identified that none of the existing systems can be extended towards our desired solution. We explored state of the art techniques like Machine translation, Speech recognition and NLP. We have utilized these in our proposed solution. Prototype of the proposed solution is developed whose functional and non functional validation is performed. Since none of existing work exactly matches to our problem statement, therefore, we have not compared the validation of our prototype to any existing system. We have validated prototype with respect to our problem domain. Moreover, this is validated iteratively from the domain experts, i.e. experts of PSL and the English to PSL human translators. We found this user centric approach very useful to help better understand the problem at the ground level, keeping our work user focused and then realization of user satisfaction level throughout the process. This work has opened a new world of opportunities where deaf can communicate with others who do not have PSL knowledge. Having this system, if it is further developed from a prototype to a functioning system; deaf institutes will have wider scope of choosing best instructors for a given domain that may not have PSL expertise. Deaf people will have more opportunities to interact with other members of the society at every level as communication is the basic pillar for this. The automatic speech to sign language is an attractive prospect; the impending applications are exhilarating and worthwhile. In the field of Human Computer Interface (HCI) we hope that our thesis will be an important addition to the ongoing research.<br>Ahmed Abdul Haseeb & Asim ilyas, Contact no. 00923215126749 House No. 310, Street No. 4 Rawal town Islamabad, Pakistan Postal Code 44000
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Kaneko, Michiko. "The poetics of sign language haiku." Thesis, University of Bristol, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/1983/10e0f467-8d9d-4568-8215-9a3e1d77147d.
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This dissertation explores the poetic features of sign language haiku. Sign language haiku can be defined as a very short piece of poetic signing, which is influenced by the traditional Japanese haiku form. Traditional Japanese haiku form is known for its strict formal discipline, objective description of nature, and strong visual appeal. Sign language haiku retains some of the basic features of traditional haiku, but has turned itself into a new poetic form which inherits characteristics both from general artistic signing and the particular discipline of haiku.
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Feng, Qianli. "Automatic American Sign Language Imitation Evaluator." The Ohio State University, 2016. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1461233570.
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Nel, Warren. "An integrated sign language recognition system." Thesis, University of Western Cape, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/11394/3584.
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Doctor Educationis<br>Research has shown that five parameters are required to recognize any sign language
gesture: hand shape, location, orientation and motion, as well as facial expressions. The
South African Sign Language (SASL) research group at the University of the Western
Cape has created systems to recognize Sign Language gestures using single parameters.
Using a single parameter can cause ambiguities in the recognition of signs that are
similarly signed resulting in a restriction of the possible vocabulary size. This research
pioneers work at the group towards combining multiple parameters to achieve a larger
recognition vocabulary set. The proposed methodology combines hand location and
hand shape recognition into one combined recognition system. The system is shown to
be able to recognize a very large vocabulary of 50 signs at a high average accuracy of
74.1%. This vocabulary size is much larger than existing SASL recognition systems,
and achieves a higher accuracy than these systems in spite of the large vocabulary. It
is also shown that the system is highly robust to variations in test subjects such as skin
colour, gender and body dimension. Furthermore, the group pioneers research towards
continuously recognizing signs from a video stream, whereas existing systems recognized a single sign at a time. To this end, a highly accurate continuous gesture segmentation strategy is proposed and shown to be able to accurately recognize sentences consisting of five isolated SASL gestures.
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Petronio, Karen M. "Clause structure in American sign language /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 1993. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/8418.
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Reiniche, Ruth Mary. "Sign Language: Flannery O'Connor's Pictorial Text." Diss., The University of Arizona, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/325225.
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Flannery O'Connor makes the invisible visible. Just as a speaker of sign language punctuates her narrative with signs that are at once pictures and words, O'Connor punctuates the narratives of her novels with moments or pauses in the forward motion of her text that are somehow framed--in a mirror, or in a window, for example--and that also are at once pictures and words. These pictorial moments not only occur in the reader's present, but because of the way they are stylized, they are simultaneously: open windows into the historical world of the mid-twentieth century; they look backward into the classical past; and they offer a veiled look into the mystery of a Divine reality. Examination of the chronological development and refinement of Flannery O'Connor's pictorial technique by considering the meaning conveyed by the arrangement of figures in a single panel cartoon, the contextual significance found in literary tableaux and filmic montage, the use of the pictorial "camera eye," and the imprinting of tattoo on the human body, presents a new perspective in interpreting her work. Early manifestation of the pictorial technique is evident in O'Connor's college cartoons. When that cartoonist becomes a novelist that tendency for exaggeration is evident in his or her pictorial renditions of characters and situations, as is the case with former cartoonists Faulkner, Updike, West, Cantor, and O'Connor herself. O'Connor does not abandon the power of the pictorial in delivering a message. Instead she embraces it and envelops it in narrative.
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Cheek, Davina Adrianne. "The phonetics and phonology of handshape in American Sign Language /." Full text (PDF) from UMI/Dissertation Abstracts International, 2001. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/utexas/fullcit?p3008299.
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Leyhe, Anya A. "An Ethnographic Inquiry: Contemporary Language Ideologies of American Sign Language." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2014. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/473.
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Historically, American Sign Language (an aspect of Deaf culture) has been rendered invisible in mainstream hearing society. Today, ASL’s popularity is evidenced in an ethnolinguistic renaissance; more second language learners pursue an interest in ASL than ever before. Nonetheless, Deaf and hearing people alike express concern about ASL’s place in hearing culture. This qualitative study engages ethnographic methods of participant observation and semi-structured interviewing as well as popular media analysis to understand language ideologies (ideas and objectives concerning roles of language in society) hearing and Deaf Signers hold about motivations and practices of other hearing Signers. Although most hearing ASLers identify as apolitical students genuinely seeking to build bridges between disparate communities, I argue that ASLers are most concerned with hearing Signers’ colonization of the language through commoditization and cultural appropriation.
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Ganiso, Mirriam Nosiphiwo. "Sign language in South Africa language planning and policy challenges." Thesis, Rhodes University, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002163.
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This thesis sets out to undertake research into the very important topic of sign language and its usage, particularly in the Western Cape Province of South Africa. Three schools are used in this study. Interviews and questionnaires were used to conduct research with teachers, students and deaf teacher assistants within this context. The analysis of this data is presented in Chapter five of this thesis.
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Belissen, Valentin. "From Sign Recognition to Automatic Sign Language Understanding : Addressing the Non-Conventionalized Units." Electronic Thesis or Diss., université Paris-Saclay, 2020. http://www.theses.fr/2020UPASG064.
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Les langues des signes (LS) se sont développées naturellement au sein des communautés de Sourds. Ne disposant pas de forme écrite, ce sont des langues orales, utilisant les canaux gestuel pour l’expression et visuel pour la réception. Ces langues peu dotées ne font pas l'objet d'un large consensus au niveau de leur description linguistique. Elles intègrent des signes lexicaux, c’est-à-dire des unités conventionnalisées du langage dont la forme est supposée arbitraire, mais aussi – et à la différence des langues vocales, si on ne considère pas la gestualité co-verbale – des structures iconiques, en utilisant l’espace pour organiser le discours. L’iconicité, ce lien entre la forme d’un signe et le sens qu’il porte, est en effet utilisée à plusieurs niveaux du discours en LS.La plupart des travaux de recherche en reconnaissance automatique de LS se sont en fait attelés à reconnaitre les signes lexicaux, d’abord sous forme isolée puis au sein de LS continue. Les corpus de vidéos associés à ces recherches sont souvent relativement artificiels, consistant en la répétition d’énoncés élicités sous forme écrite, parfois en LS interprétée, qui peut également présenter des différences importantes avec la LS naturelle.Dans cette thèse, nous souhaitons montrer les limites de cette approche, en élargissant cette perspective pour envisager la reconnaissance d’éléments utilisés pour la construction du discours ou au sein de structures illustratives.Pour ce faire, nous montrons l’intérêt et les limites des corpus de linguistes : la langue y est naturelle et les annotations parfois détaillées, mais pas toujours utilisables en données d’entrée de système d’apprentissage automatique, car pas nécessairement cohérentes. Nous proposons alors la refonte d’un corpus de dialogue en langue des signes française, Dicta-Sign-LSF-v2, avec des annotations riches et cohérentes, suivant un schéma d’annotation partagé par de nombreux linguistes.Nous proposons ensuite une redéfinition du problème de la reconnaissance automatique de LS, consistant en la reconnaissance de divers descripteurs linguistiques, plutôt que de se focaliser sur les signes lexicaux uniquement. En parallèle, nous discutons de métriques de la performance adaptées.Pour réaliser une première expérience de reconnaissance de descripteurs linguistiques non uniquement lexicaux, nous développons alors une représentation compacte et généralisable des signeurs dans les vidéos. Celle-ci est en effet réalisée par un traitement parallèle des mains, du visage et du haut du corps, en utilisant des outils existants ainsi que des modèles que nous avons développés. Un prétraitement permet alors de former un vecteur de caractéristiques pertinentes. Par la suite, nous présentons une architecture adaptée et modulaire d’apprentissage automatique de descripteurs linguistiques, consistant en un réseau de neurones récurrent et convolutionnel.Nous montrons enfin via une analyse quantitative et qualitative l’effectivité du modèle proposé, testé sur Dicta-Sign-LSF-v2. Nous réalisons en premier lieu une analyse approfondie du paramétrage, en évaluant tant le modèle d'apprentissage que la représentation des signeurs. L’étude des prédictions du modèle montre alors le bien-fondé de l'approche proposée, avec une performance tout à fait intéressante pour la reconnaissance continue de quatre descripteurs linguistiques, notamment au vu de l’incertitude relative aux annotations elles-mêmes. La segmentation de ces dernières est en effet subjective, et la pertinence même des catégories utilisées n’est pas démontrée de manière forte. Indirectement, le modèle proposé pourrait donc permettre de mesurer la validité de ces catégories. Avec plusieurs pistes d’amélioration envisagées, notamment sur la représentation des signeurs et l’utilisation de corpus de taille supérieure, le bilan est très encourageant et ouvre la voie à une acception plus large de la reconnaissance continue de langue des signes<br>Sign Languages (SLs) have developed naturally in Deaf communities. With no written form, they are oral languages, using the gestural channel for expression and the visual channel for reception. These poorly endowed languages do not meet with a broad consensus at the linguistic level. These languages make use of lexical signs, i.e. conventionalized units of language whose form is supposed to be arbitrary, but also - and unlike vocal languages, if we don't take into account the co-verbal gestures - iconic structures, using space to organize discourse. Iconicity, which is defined as the existence of a similarity between the form of a sign and the meaning it carries, is indeed used at several levels of SL discourse.Most research in automatic Sign Language Recognition (SLR) has in fact focused on recognizing lexical signs, at first in the isolated case and then within continuous SL. The video corpora associated with such research are often relatively artificial, consisting of the repetition of elicited utterances in written form. Other corpora consist of interpreted SL, which may also differ significantly from natural SL, as it is strongly influenced by the surrounding vocal language.In this thesis, we wish to show the limits of this approach, by broadening this perspective to consider the recognition of elements used for the construction of discourse or within illustrative structures.To do so, we show the interest and the limits of the corpora developed by linguists. In these corpora, the language is natural and the annotations are sometimes detailed, but not always usable as input data for machine learning systems, as they are not necessarily complete or coherent. We then propose the redesign of a French Sign Language dialogue corpus, Dicta-Sign-LSF-v2, with rich and consistent annotations, following an annotation scheme shared by many linguists.We then propose a redefinition of the problem of automatic SLR, consisting in the recognition of various linguistic descriptors, rather than focusing on lexical signs only. At the same time, we discuss adapted metrics for relevant performance assessment.In order to perform a first experiment on the recognition of linguistic descriptors that are not only lexical, we then develop a compact and generalizable representation of signers in videos. This is done by parallel processing of the hands, face and upper body, using existing tools and models that we have set up. Besides, we preprocess these parallel representations to obtain a relevant feature vector. We then present an adapted and modular architecture for automatic learning of linguistic descriptors, consisting of a recurrent and convolutional neural network.Finally, we show through a quantitative and qualitative analysis the effectiveness of the proposed model, tested on Dicta-Sign-LSF-v2. We first carry out an in-depth analysis of the parameterization, evaluating both the learning model and the signer representation. The study of the model predictions then demonstrates the merits of the proposed approach, with a very interesting performance for the continuous recognition of four linguistic descriptors, especially in view of the uncertainty related to the annotations themselves. The segmentation of the latter is indeed subjective, and the very relevance of the categories used is not strongly demonstrated. Indirectly, the proposed model could therefore make it possible to measure the validity of these categories. With several areas for improvement being considered, particularly in terms of signer representation and the use of larger corpora, the results are very encouraging and pave the way for a wider understanding of continuous Sign Language Recognition
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Nurena-Jara, Roberto, Cristopher Ramos-Carrion, and Pedro Shiguihara-Juarez. "Data collection of 3D spatial features of gestures from static peruvian sign language alphabet for sign language recognition." Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc, 2020. http://hdl.handle.net/10757/656634.
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El texto completo de este trabajo no está disponible en el Repositorio Académico UPC por restricciones de la casa editorial donde ha sido publicado.<br>Peruvian Sign Language Recognition (PSL) is approached as a classification problem. Previous work has employed 2D features from the position of hands to tackle this problem. In this paper, we propose a method to construct a dataset consisting of 3D spatial positions of static gestures from the PSL alphabet, using the HTC Vive device and a well-known technique to extract 21 keypoints from the hand to obtain a feature vector. A dataset of 35, 400 instances of gestures for PSL was constructed and a novel way to extract data was stated. To validate the appropriateness of this dataset, a comparison of four baselines classifiers in the Peruvian Sign Language Recognition (PSLR) task was stated, achieving 99.32% in the average in terms of F1 measure in the best case.<br>Revisión por pares
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Potrus, Dani. "Swedish Sign Language Skills Training and Assessment." Thesis, KTH, Skolan för datavetenskap och kommunikation (CSC), 2017. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-209129.
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Sign language is used widely around the world as a first language for those that are unable to use spoken language and by groups of people that have a disability which precludes them from using spoken language (such as a hearing impairment). The importance of effective learning of sign language and its applications in modern computer science has grown widely in the modern aged society and research around sign language recognition has sprouted in many different directions, some examples using hidden markov models (HMMs) to train models to recognize different sign language patterns (Swedish sign language, American sign language, Korean sign language, German sign language and so on). This thesis project researches the assessment and skill efficiency of using a simple video game to learn Swedish sign language for children in the ages within the range of 10 to 11 with no learning disorders, or any health disorders. During the experimental testing, 38 children are divided into two equally sized groups of 19 where each group plays a sign language video game. The context of the video game is the same for both groups, where both listened to a 3D avatar speak to them using both spoken language and sign language. The first group played the game and answered questions given to them by using sign language, whereas the other group answered questions given to them by clicking on an alternative on the video game screen. A week after the children have played the video game, the sign language skills that they have acquired from playing the video game are assessed by simple questions where they are asked to provide some of the signs that they saw during the duration of the video game. The main hypothesis of the project is that the group of children that answered by signing outperforms the other group, in both remembering the signs and executing them correctly. A statistical null hypothesis test is performed on this hypothesis, in which the main hypothesis is confirmed. Lastly, discussions for future research within sign language assessment using video games is described in the final chapter of the thesis.<br>Teckenspråk används i stor grad runt om i världen som ett modersmål för dom som inte kan använda vardagligt talsspråk och utav grupper av personer som har en funktionsnedsättning (t.ex. en hörselskada). Betydelsen av effektivt lärande av teckenspråk och dess tillämpningar i modern datavetenskap har ökat i stor utsträckning i det moderna samhället, och forskning kring teckenspråklig igenkänning har spirat i många olika riktningar, ett exempel är med hjälp av statistika modeller såsom dolda markovmodeller (eng. Hidden markov models) för att träna modeller för att känna igen olika teckenspråksmönster (bland dessa ingår Svenskt teckenspråk, Amerikanskt teckenspråk, Koreanskt teckenspråk, Tyskt teckenspråk med flera). Denna rapport undersöker bedömningen och skickligheten av att använda ett enkelt teckenspråksspel som har utvecklats för att lära ut enkla Svenska teckenspråksmönster för barn i åldrarna 10 till 11 års ålder som inte har några inlärningssjukdomar eller några problem med allmän hälsa. Under projektets experiment delas 38 barn upp i två lika stora grupper om 19 i vardera grupp, där varje grupp kommer att få spela ett teckenspråksspel. Sammanhanget för spelet är detsamma för båda grupperna, där de får höra och se en tredimensionell figur (eng. 3D Avatar) tala till dom med både talsspråk och teckenspråk. Den första gruppen spelar spelet och svarar på frågor som ges till dem med hjälp av teckenspråk, medan den andra gruppen svarar på frågor som ges till dem genom att klicka på ett av fem alternativ som finns på spelets skärm. En vecka efter att barnen har utfört experimentet med teckenspråksspelet bedöms deras teckenspråkliga färdigheter som de har fått från spelet genom att de ombeds återuppge några av de tecknena som de såg under spelets varaktighet. Rapportens hypotes är att de barn som tillhör gruppen som fick ge teckenspråk som svar till frågorna som ställdes överträffar den andra gruppen, genom att både komma ihåg tecknena och återuppge dom på korrekt sätt. En statistisk hypotesprövning utförs på denna hypotes, där denna i sin tur bekräftas. Slutligen beskrivs det i rapportens sista kapitel om framtida forskning inom teckenspråksbedömning med tv spel och deras effektivitet.
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Barnhart, Lindsay J. "Development of sign language for young children." Menomonie, WI : University of Wisconsin--Stout, 2006. http://www.uwstout.edu/lib/thesis/2006/2006barnhartl.pdf.
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Zafrulla, Zahoor. "Automatic recognition of American sign language classifiers." Diss., Georgia Institute of Technology, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/1853/53461.
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Automatically recognizing classifier-based grammatical structures of American Sign Language (ASL) is a challenging problem. Classifiers in ASL utilize surrogate hand shapes for people or "classes" of objects and provide information about their location, movement and appearance. In the past researchers have focused on recognition of finger spelling, isolated signs, facial expressions and interrogative words like WH-questions (e.g. Who, What, Where, and When). Challenging problems such as recognition of ASL sentences and classifier-based grammatical structures remain relatively unexplored in the field of ASL recognition.
One application of recognition of classifiers is toward creating educational games to help young deaf children acquire language skills. Previous work developed CopyCat, an educational ASL game that requires children to engage in a progressively more difficult expressive signing task as they advance through the game.
We have shown that by leveraging context we can use verification, in place of recognition, to boost machine performance for determining if the signed responses in an expressive signing task, like in the CopyCat game, are correct or incorrect. We have demonstrated that the quality of a machine verifier's ability to identify the boundary of the signs can be improved by using a novel two-pass technique that combines signed input in both forward and reverse directions. Additionally, we have shown that we can reduce CopyCat's dependency on custom manufactured hardware by using an off-the-shelf Microsoft Kinect depth camera to achieve similar verification performance. Finally, we show how we can extend our ability to recognize sign language by leveraging depth maps to develop a method using improved hand detection and hand shape classification to recognize selected classifier-based grammatical structures of ASL.
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Sze, Yim Binh Felix. "Topic construction in Hong Kong sign language." Thesis, University of Bristol, 2008. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.479529.
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Barker, Dean. "Computer facial animation for sign language visualization." Thesis, Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/10019.1/50300.
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Thesis (MSc)--University of Stellenbosch, 2005.<br>ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Sign Language is a fully-fledged natural language possessing its own syntax and grammar; a fact
which implies that the problem of machine translation from a spoken source language to Sign
Language is at least as difficult as machine translation between two spoken languages. Sign
Language, however, is communicated in a modality fundamentally different from all spoken
languages. Machine translation to Sign Language is therefore burdened not only by a mapping
from one syntax and grammar to another, but also, by a non-trivial transformation from one
communicational modality to another.
With regards to the computer visualization of Sign Language; what is required is a three
dimensional, temporally accurate, visualization of signs including both the manual and nonmanual
components which can be viewed from arbitrary perspectives making accurate understanding
and imitation more feasible. Moreover, given that facial expressions and movements
represent a fundamental basis for the majority of non-manual signs, any system concerned with
the accurate visualization of Sign Language must rely heavily on a facial animation component
capable of representing a well-defined set of emotional expressions as well as a set of arbitrary
facial movements.
This thesis investigates the development of such a computer facial animation system. We address
the problem of delivering coordinated, temporally constrained, facial animation sequences
in an online environment using VRML. Furthermore, we investigate the animation, using a muscle
model process, of arbitrary three-dimensional facial models consisting of multiple aligned
NURBS surfaces of varying refinement.
Our results showed that this approach is capable of representing and manipulating high
fidelity three-dimensional facial models in such a manner that localized distortions of the models
result in the recognizable and realistic display of human facial expressions and that these facial
expressions can be displayed in a coordinated, synchronous manner.<br>AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Gebaretaal is 'n volwaardige natuurlike taal wat oor sy eie sintaks en grammatika beskik.
Hierdie feit impliseer dat die probleem rakende masjienvertaling vanuit 'n gesproke taal na
Gebaretaal net so moeilik is as masjienvertaling tussen twee gesproke tale. Gebaretaal word
egter in 'n modaliteit gekommunikeer wat in wese van alle gesproke tale verskil. Masjienvertaling
in Gebaretaal word daarom nie net belas deur 'n afbeelding van een sintaks en grammatika op 'n
ander nie, maar ook deur beduidende omvorming van een kommunikasiemodaliteit na 'n ander.
Wat die gerekenariseerde visualisering van Gebaretaal betref, vereis dit 'n driedimensionele,
tyds-akkurate visualisering van gebare, insluitend komponente wat met en sonder die gebruik
van die hande uitgevoer word, en wat vanuit arbitrêre perspektiewe beskou kan word ten
einde die uitvoerbaarheid van akkurate begrip en nabootsing te verhoog. Aangesien gesigsuitdrukkings
en -bewegings die fundamentele grondslag van die meeste gebare wat nie met die
hand gemaak word nie, verteenwoordig, moet enige stelsel wat te make het met die akkurate
visualisering van Gebaretaal boonop sterk steun op 'n gesigsanimasiekomponent wat daartoe in
staat is om 'n goed gedefinieerde stel emosionele uitdrukkings sowel as 'n stel arbitrre gesigbewegings
voor te stel.
Hierdie tesis ondersoek die ontwikkeling van so 'n gerekenariseerde gesigsanimasiestelsel. Die
probleem rakende die lewering van gekordineerde, tydsbegrensde gesigsanimasiesekwensies in 'n
intydse omgewing, wat gebruik maak van VRML, word aangeroer. Voorts word ondersoek
ingestel na die animasie (hier word van 'n spiermodelproses gebruik gemaak) van arbitrre driedimensionele
gesigsmodelle bestaande uit veelvoudige, opgestelde NURBS-oppervlakke waarvan
die verfyning wissel.
Die resultate toon dat hierdie benadering daartoe in staat is om hoë kwaliteit driedimensionele
gesigsmodelle só voor te stel en te manipuleer dat gelokaliseerde vervormings van die
modelle die herkenbare en realistiese tentoonstelling van menslike gesigsuitdrukkings tot gevolg het en dat hierdie gesigsuitdrukkings op 'n gekordineerde, sinchroniese wyse uitgebeeld kan
word.
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Pollitt, Kyra Margaret. "Signart: (British) sign language poetry as Gesamtkunstwerk." Thesis, University of Bristol, 2014. https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.658072.
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This thesis explores the phenomenon of poetry in British Sign Language. Whilst previous scholars have examined the form from linguistic and literary perspectives, no work has yet fully addressed the unique visual properties of British Sign Language as it is exploited creatively. This study situates current understandings of sign language poetry, tracing the influences of ocularcentrism and logo centrism on the discipline of deaf studies. 'Sign language poetry' is then recontextualised through the phenomenology ofMerleau-Ponty and Derridean grammatology to emerge as Signart - the performed and performative, visual and embodied artform of sign language communities. In addition to examining the theoretical frameworks through which academic, literary and artistic institutions might perceive and encounter it, Signart is explored through interviews with Signartists, their audiences, and those who have not previously been exposed to Signart. A pilot translation of a Signartwork uncovers the significance of image in the form and leads to the adoption of a/r/tography as 'blurred' research method involving art practices, research and translation. A collective of visual artists is established to examine image in a core sample of four Signartworks, and further data is collected through two public events staged at the Royal West of England Academy. The results of these investigations suggest Signart as not only blended acts of literature and drawing (here called illumination), but also of gesture-dance, compositional rhythm and cinematic properties which effect a social SCUlpture of deafhood within signing communities. The blend of artforms within Signart invites comparison with the concerns of the modernist project; with ideas of synthesis, of synaesthesia and particularly of Gesamtkunstwerk. To illustrate the relevance of these concepts to an expanded understanding of Signart, the thesis draws on art epistemology and the ideas and works of a number of modernist and post-modernist artists - notably Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Joseph Beuys.
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Zhou, Mingjie. "Deep networks for sign language video caption." HKBU Institutional Repository, 2020. https://repository.hkbu.edu.hk/etd_oa/848.
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In the hearing-loss community, sign language is a primary tool to communicate with people while there is a communication gap between hearing-loss people with normal hearing people. Sign language is different from spoken language. It has its own vocabulary and grammar. Recent works concentrate on the sign language video caption which consists of sign language recognition and sign language translation. Continuous sign language recognition, which can bridge the communication gap, is a challenging task because of the weakly supervised ordered annotations where no frame-level label is provided. To overcome this problem, connectionist temporal classification (CTC) is the most widely used method. However, CTC learning could perform badly if the extracted features are not good. For better feature extraction, this thesis presents the novel self-attention-based fully-inception (SAFI) networks for vision-based end-to-end continuous sign language recognition. Considering the length of sign words differs from each other, we introduce the fully inception network with different receptive fields to extract dynamic clip-level features. To further boost the performance, the fully inception network with an auxiliary classifier is trained with aggregation cross entropy (ACE) loss. Then the encoder of self-attention networks as the global sequential feature extractor is used to model the clip-level features with CTC. The proposed model is optimized by jointly training with ACE on clip-level feature learning and CTC on global sequential feature learning in an end-to-end fashion. The best method in the baselines achieves 35.6% WER on the validation set and 34.5% WER on the test set. It employs a better decoding algorithm for generating pseudo labels to do the EM-like optimization to fine-tune the CNN module. In contrast, our approach focuses on the better feature extraction for end-to-end learning. To alleviate the overfitting on the limited dataset, we employ temporal elastic deformation to triple the real-world dataset RWTH- PHOENIX-Weather 2014. Experimental results on the real-world dataset RWTH- PHOENIX-Weather 2014 demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach which achieves 31.7% WER on the validation set and 31.2% WER on the test set. Even though sign language recognition can, to some extent, help bridge the communication gap, it is still organized in sign language grammar which is different from spoken language. Unlike sign language recognition that recognizes sign gestures, sign language translation (SLT) converts sign language to a target spoken language text which normal hearing people commonly use in their daily life. To achieve this goal, this thesis provides an effective sign language translation approach which gains state-of-the-art performance on the largest real-life German sign language translation database, RWTH-PHOENIX-Weather 2014T. Besides, a direct end-to-end sign language translation approach gives out promising results (an impressive gain from 9.94 to 13.75 BLEU and 9.58 to 14.07 BLEU on the validation set and test set) without intermediate recognition annotations. The comparative and promising experimental results show the feasibility of the direct end-to-end SLT
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Cole, Jessica. "American Sign Language poetry literature in motion /." Diss., [La Jolla, Calif.] : University of California, San Diego, 2009. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/ucsd/fullcit?p1462125.
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Thesis (M.A.)--University of California, San Diego, 2009.<br>Title from first page of PDF file (viewed April 3, 2009). Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations. Includes bibliographical references (p. 73-76).
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Nayak, Sunita. "Representation and learning for sign language recognition." [Tampa, Fla] : University of South Florida, 2008. http://purl.fcla.edu/usf/dc/et/SFE0002362.
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Mantovan, Lara <1985>. "Nominal modification in Italian sign language (LIS)." Doctoral thesis, Università Ca' Foscari Venezia, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10579/5642.
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This dissertation presents a systematic analysis on the syntax of nominal expressions in LIS (Italian sign language). Combining three apparently irreconcilable theoretical frameworks, namely linguistic typology, generative linguistics, and sociolinguistics, new insights on the structure of LIS nominal domain are offered.
In this thesis, three empirical studies are presented. The first one is a quantitative study on the distribution of LIS nominal modifiers with respect to the noun. The second one is a quantitative study on the duration of these modifiers. The findings resulting from these two studies, both based on the investigation of corpus data through statistical computing, reveal that the variation instantiated in LIS nominal expressions display a considerable amount of linguistic variation. However, this variation is far from being random since it appears highly constrained by the syntactic options that natural languages allow. The third study focuses on the syntactic behavior characterizing cardinal numerals in LIS. In particular, this study shows how quantitative and qualitative procedures can be fruitfully combined together in order to provide a clearer picture of the issue under investigation. The analysis of corpus data and elicited data specifically collected for this thesis reveals that the distribution of cardinals is highly sensitive to the fine-grained distinction between definite and indefinite nominal expressions.
All these aspects are accounted for in a syntactic analysis showing that the constraints observed in crosslinguistic variation are also applicable to languages instantiating intralinguistic variation like LIS.
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Fornasiero, Elena <1991>. "EVALUATIVE MORPHOLOGY IN ITALIAN SIGN LANGUAGE (LIS)." Master's Degree Thesis, Università Ca' Foscari Venezia, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/10579/8145.
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The present dissertation investigates the existence and realization of processes conveying features of diminutive, augmentative, endearment and pejorative in Italian Sign Language (LIS). Within the theoretical background of the Cartographic Project and Linguistic Typology, this work is also an attempt to demonstrate whether the theory of the extended projection of the NP proposed by Cinque (2005, 2015) accounts for LIS as well, by observing if the order of LIS constituents respects the universal one.
For the investigation, I developed a research involving three LIS native signers in tasks of elicitation, narration and grammaticality judgements and I analysed a corpus of 22 tales produced in LIS by LIS native signers.
The objective was to see if those features usually defined by the adjectives big, small, cute, ugly, could be incorporated in the sign of the noun and conveyed without the articulation of the sign of the adjective. The results demonstrated that non-manual markers and classifiers have a main role in these processes and that their articulation respects the position of their functional projections within the syntactic structure, supporting my hypothesis to concern NNMs conveying features of diminutive, augmentative, endearment and pejorative as heads of dedicated functional projections. Finally, I confirm that processes of evaluative morphology constitute a morphological type while providing examples from other sign languages: ASL, LSF, ISL, BSL, DGS, PJM, AdaSL.
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Schembri, Adam C. "Issues in the analysis of polycomponential verbs in Australian Sign Language (Auslan)." Phd thesis, Department of Linguistics, 2002. http://hdl.handle.net/2123/6272.
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McBurney, Susan Lloyd. "Referential morphology in signed languages /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 2004. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/8436.
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Börstell, Carl. "Revisiting Reduplication : Toward a description of reduplication in predicative signs in Swedish Sign Language." Thesis, Stockholms universitet, Institutionen för lingvistik, 2011. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-63510.
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This study investigates the use of reduplication with predicative signs in Swedish Sign Language (SSL), and also the related phenomena doubling and displacement. Reduplication in SSL typically expresses plurality of events and/or referents, but may also express intensification, ongoing event or generic activity. There is a distinction between external and internal events with reduplication: external reduplication expresses some event happening over and over at different points in time and/or with different referents, and is associated with a frequentative/habitual reading; internal reduplication expresses some event consisting of several e.g. movements/actions and is associated with an ongoing reading. Only external expression seems to be applicable to stative constructions, as one would expect. The study also found a phenomenon not previously described: oral reduplication without manual reduplication. This process is found to have the ongoing functions with telic predicates, such that it focuses on the telic predicate as a single event in progress, and thus replaces the function of manual reduplication, which, with telic predicates, would instead express several events. The reading of reduplicated signs is associated with the semantics of the sign reduplicated, and it is also associated with the phonological citation form of the sign—monosyllabic signs tend to get pluractional reading; bisyllabic signs tend to get an ongoing reading. Also, the reading expressed by reduplication is connected to the presence/absence of oral reduplication. Reduplication generally does not occur in negative constructions. This study shows that inherently negative signs may be reduplicated, but reduplicated predicates are negated according to other strategies than for non-reduplicated predicates, thus reduplication has the largest scope. Doubling and displacement are both associated mainly with plural referents, and it is in this respect that they are related to reduplication, and they both occur frequently with reduplication.
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Casey, Shannon Kerry. ""Agreement" in gestures and signed languages : the use of directionality to indicate referents involved in actions /." Diss., Connect to a 24 p. preview or request complete full text in PDF format. Access restricted to UC campuses, 2003. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/ucsd/fullcit?p3094623.
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Zorzi, Giorgia. "Coordination and gapping in Catalan Sign Language (LSC)." Doctoral thesis, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/10803/665045.
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This thesis gives a description and a syntactic analysis for coordination and gapping in conjunction in Catalan Sign Language (LSC) within the framework of Generative Grammar and Minimalism. Regarding coordination, Coordination Phrase (CoP) is proposed as the category for conjunctive, disjunctive and adversative coordination, assuming that the conjuncts are specifiers and complements of CoP in a right-branching coordination structure. The specific derivation for each types of coordination is then applied.
As for gapping in conjunction, in LSC it shows similarities with VP-ellipsis, especially because it can appear also in subordination. Moreover, the availability of only distributed scope negation (¬A&¬B) and the presence of contrastive topic and contrastive focus require a large coordination structure, that is, CP coordination. In order to derive gapping, I propose movement of the arguments to TopP and FocP followed by the deletion of TP at PF, with [E] feature in the head of FocP.<br>Aquesta tesi ofereix una descripció i una anàlisi sintàctica per a la coordinació i el “gapping” en coordinació conjuntiva en llengua de signes catalana (LSC), dins el marc generativista i minimista. Pel que fa a la coordinació, la categoria sintàctica que es proposa és “Coordination Phrase” (CoP) per a la coordinació conjuntiva, disjuntiva i adversativa. A l’estructura, ramificada a la dreta, els constituents de la conjunció són especificadors i complements de CoP. La derivació per a cada tipus de coordinació s’aplica a partir d’aquest model.
Pel que fa al “gapping”, mostra proprietats similars a l’el·lipsi de SV (VP-ellipsis), sobretot perquè pot aparèixer en subordinació. A més, la l’existència només d’un abast distribuït de la negació (¬A&¬B) i la presència de tòpic i focus contrastius mostra la necessitat de tenir una coordinació “àmplia” on els dos conjunts siguin CPs. En la derivació de “gapping”, els arguments es mouen a TopP i FocP, seguits de l’eliminació del TP a PF, ambel tret [E] posicionat al nucli de FocP.
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Adam, Jameel. "Video annotation wiki for South African sign language." Thesis, University of the Western Cape, 2011. http://etd.uwc.ac.za/index.php?module=etd&action=viewtitle&id=gen8Srv25Nme4_1540_1304499135.
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<p>The SASL project at the University of the Western Cape aims at developing a fully automated translation system between English and South African Sign Language (SASL). Three important aspects of this system require SASL documentation and knowledge. These are: recognition of SASL from a video sequence, linguistic translation between SASL and English and the rendering of SASL. Unfortunately, SASL documentation is a scarce resource and no official or complete documentation exists. This research focuses on creating an online collaborative video annotation knowledge management system for SASL where various members of the community can upload SASL videos to and annotate them in any of the sign language notation systems, SignWriting, HamNoSys and/or Stokoe. As such, knowledge about SASL structure is pooled into a central and freely accessible knowledge base that can be used as required. The usability and performance of the system were evaluated. The usability of the system was graded by users on a rating scale from one to five for a specific set of tasks. The system was found to have an overall usability of 3.1, slightly better than average. The performance evaluation included load and stress tests which measured the system response time for a number of users for a specific set of tasks. It was found that the system is stable and can scale up to cater for an increasing user base by improving the underlying hardware.</p>
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Cooper, H. M. "Sign language recognition : generalising to more complex corpora." Thesis, University of Surrey, 2010. http://epubs.surrey.ac.uk/843617/.
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The aim of this thesis is to find new approaches to Sign Language Recognition (SLR) which are suited to working with the Limited corpora currently available. Data available for SLR is of limited quality; low resolution and frame rates make the task of recognition even more complex. The content is rarely natural, concentrating on isolated signs and filmed under laboratory conditions. In addition, the amount of accurately labelled data is minimal. To this end, several contributions are made: Tracking the hands is eschewed in favour of detection based techniques more robust to noise; for both signs and for linguistically-motivated sign sub-units are investigated, to make best use of limited data sets. Finally, an algorithm is proposed to learn signs from the inset signers on TV, with the aid of the accompanying subtitles, thus increasing the corpus of data available. Tracking fast moving hands under laboratory conditions is a complex task, move this to real world data and the challenge is even greater. When using tracked data as a base for SLR, the errors in the tracking are compounded at the classification stage. Proposed instead, is a novel sign detection method, which views space-time as a 3D volume and the sign within it as an object to be located. Features are combined into strong classifiers using a novel boosting implementation designed to create optimal classifiers over sparse datasets. Using boosted volumetric features, on a robust frame differenced input, average classification rates reach 71% on seen signers and 66% on a mixture of seen and unseen signers, with individual sign classification rates gaining 95%. Using a classifier per sign approach to SLR, means that data sets need to contain numerous examples of the signs to be learnt. Instead, this thesis proposes learnt classifiers to detect the common sub-units of sign. The responses of these classifiers can then be combined for recognition at the sign level. This approach requires fewer examples per sign to be learnt, since the sub-unit detectors are trained on data from multiple signs. It is also faster at detection time since there are fewer classifiers to consult, the number of these being limited by the linguistics of sign and not the number of signs being detected. For this method, appearance based boosted classifiers are introduced to distinguish the sub-units of sign. Results show that when combined with temporal models, these novel sub-unit classifiers, can outperform similar- classifiers learnt on tracked results. As an added side effect; since the sub-units are linguistically derived they can be used independently to help linguistic annotators. Since sign language data sets are costly to collect and annotate, there are not many publicly available. Those which are, tend to be constrained in content and often taken under laboratory conditions. However, in the UK, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) regularly produces programs with an inset signer and corresponding subtitles. This provides a natural signer, covering a wide range of topics, in real world conditions. While it has no ground truth, it is proposed that the translated subtitles can provide weak labels for learning signs. The final contributions of this thesis, lead to an innovative approach to learn signs from these co-occurring streams of data. Using a unique, temporally constrained, version of the Apriori mining algorithm, similar sections of video are identified as possible sign locations. These estimates are improved upon by introducing the concept of contextual negatives, removing contextually similar noise. Combined with an iterative honing process, to enhance the localisation of the target sign, 23 word/sign combinations are learnt from a 30 minute news broadcast, providing a novel method for automatic data set creation.
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Yi, Beifang. "A framework for a sign language interfacing system." abstract and full text PDF (free order & download UNR users only), 2006. http://0-gateway.proquest.com.innopac.library.unr.edu/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:3210068.
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Quinto-Pozos, David Gilbert. "Contact between Mexican sign language and American sign language in two Texas border areas." Thesis, 2002. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/utexas/fullcit?p3082889.
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Cormier, Kearsy Annette. "Grammaticization of indexic signs how American Sign Language expresses numerosity /." 2002. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/utexas/fullcit?p3077627.
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Yoel, Judith. "Canada's Maritime sign language." 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/1993/21581.
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Belaldavar, Amruthraj. "American Sign Language generator /." 2008. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1597619941&sid=3&Fmt=2&clientId=10361&RQT=309&VName=PQD.
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Reed, Lauren W. "Sign Languages of Western Highlands, Papua New Guinea, and their Challenges for Sign Language Typology." Master's thesis, 2019. http://hdl.handle.net/1885/165444.
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The diverse sign languages (SLs) between established deaf community SLs and homesign have been called the “grey area” of SL linguistics, by virtue of their resistance to classification and the fact that they are understudied (Nyst, 2010, p. 416). This thesis investigates the languages of 12 deaf people living in the Nebilyer/Kaugel region of the rural Papua New Guinea highlands, with the view to situating them within the extant sociodemographic typology of SLs. I do this by considering sociodemographic data of deaf individuals, comparison of sign bases to determine lexical consistency, and emic perspectives of users. As a result of these analyses, I find that the diverse but interrelated languages of these 12 deaf people are not well classified within the existing sociodemographic taxonomy of SLs. In order to expand that taxonomy, I first present the concept of a sign network, which is a network of strong and weak sign ties, with strength defined as the presence of fluent, regular signed communication between individuals, irrespective of deaf/hearing status. I offer the new category of a nucleated network SL, the sign network of which is characterised by a central deaf individual with multiple strong sign ties to other individuals, who prototypically are all hearing. This is differentiated, I argue, from a canonical homesign language such as David’s (Goldin-Meadow, 2003), which is characterised by only weak sign ties to other individuals, either deaf or hearing. As such, I advocate for the extension of Horton’s (in press) typological category of “individual homesign” to account for regular contact not only with deaf signers, but hearing ones as well. In determining the degree of lexical consistency between SLs, I present the metric of sign base comparison, predicated on the idea that even in iconic signs, there is a measure of arbitrariness underlying which aspect of a referent is selected (cf. Planer & Kalkman, 2019). This is a useful tool for work with SLs whose users exhibit a high degree of intra-signer variation in form, and thus cannot be well compared using the standard model of sublexical parameter comparison (cf. McKee & Kennedy, 2000; Guerra Currie, Meier, & Walters, 2002). I account for the high level of lexical consistency between Nebilyer/Kaugel SLs with the notion of a regional sign network, which is a sign network characterised by an abundance of weak sign ties between individuals in a larger region. I propose that signs diffuse along these weak sign ties, which accounts for lexical consistency between the languages of largely unconnected deaf people and their networks. The regional sign network model provides an explanation for similarly reported degrees of lexical consistency in other rural SL situations, where this cannot be explained wholly in terms of independent invention or recruitment of majority community gesture (e.g. Osugi, Supalla, & Webb, 1999). This research enriches the sociodemographic typology of SLs, filling in missing links in the “grey area”, and offering tools to continue to do so (Nyst, 2010, p. 416). More broadly, it also contributes to our understanding of how patterns of human sociality condition language shape.
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Lin, Chien-hung, and 林建宏. "Tense in Taiwan Sign Language." Thesis, 2007. http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/94258836592973163892.
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碩士<br>國立中正大學<br>語言所<br>95<br>Tense allows a speaker to locate a situation relative to speech time. Taiwan Sign Language(hereafter TSL) is a language that is not morphologically marked for tense. In TSL, tense are directly determined by temporal adverbials. The main purpose of this thesis is to investigate how TSL expresses tense, how modality effects influence tense expression, and what kind of conceptual structure is employed while locating the event in time.
This thesis investigates three major issues. The first issue emphasizes the difference between the discreteness-oriented analysis and the gradience-oriented analysis. Traditional linguistics generally defines language so as to exclude not only meaningful gestures but also meaningful gradient aspects of speech signal. Thus language signal is characterized by discreteness. In the light of discreteness, temporal signs are treated as directing to the predetermined loci by means of time lines. However we pointed out that time lines are confronted by the unpredictability of placement. Following Liddell’s (2003) claim, we regard that grammar, gradience and gesture are tightly intertwined in expressing meaning. Based on this concept, the placement of a temporal sign is not limited to a predetermined set of possible loci. Since the hand can move in an unlimited number of directions, the range of directions is gradient. Meaning construction indicates that meaning realization is through the mapping between mental space and semantic space, and the directionality of a temporal sign toward a blended element of blend space provides a mapping instruction.
Secondly, the lexicon formation strategy of locating temporal adverbials (hereafter LTA) is elucidated. Similar to Mandarin, TSL resorts to LTA to locate the event in time. We further divided LTA into deictic, anaphoric, and referential adverbials. By means of metaphor “Future is Ahead” and directionality, we offer systematic account for LTA. Meanwhile, we also properly handle the controversial issue - numeral incorporation. Additionally, we compare the lexicon formation strategy of LTA in TSL and Mandarin. Mandarin is an official language enforced in Taiwan, and most TSL signers are familiar with Mandarin. Mandarin employs several types of metaphors to express the time, such as shang / xia (up / down), qian / hou (front /back), lai / qu (come /go). However, TSL without being influenced by Mandarin has an independent metaphor schema employing in the formation of LTA.
Thirdly, we emphasize the temporal relation in discourse of TSL. By comparing of grammatical tense of English and nongrammatical tense of Mandarin, we figure out the functions of LTA and the lack of awareness of present in TSL. With a view of LTA denoting the temporal frame for following events to anchored, we further investigate how the temporal frames are established, allocated, and rearranged in the signing space. Once the temporal frame is set up in signing space, we can locate events in time by means of modifying the directionality of sign to associate the time, without repeating LTA.