Deepali Goyal


2020

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Automatic Translation of Complex English Sentences to Indian Sign Language Synthetic Video Animations
Deepali Goyal | Vishal Goyal | Lalit Goyal
Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Natural Language Processing (ICON): System Demonstrations

Sign Language is the natural way of expressing thoughts and feelings for the deaf community. Sign language is a diagrammatic and non-verbal language used by the impaired community to communicate their feeling to their lookalike one. Today we live in the era of technological development, owing to which instant communication is quite easy but even then, a lot of work needs to be done in the field of Sign language automation to improve the quality of life among the deaf community. The traditional approaches used for representing the signs are in the form of videos or text that are expensive, time-consuming, and are not easy to use. In this research work, an attempt is made for the conversion of Complex and Compound English sentences to Indian Sign Language (ISL) using synthetic video animations. The translation architecture includes a parsing module that parses the input complex or compound English sentences to their simplified versions by using complex to simple and compound to simple English grammar rules respectively. The simplified sentence is then forwarded to the conversion segment that rearranges the words of the English language into its corresponding ISL using the devised grammar rules. The next segment constitutes the removal of unwanted words or stop words. This segment gets an input sentence generated by ISL grammar rules. Unwanted or unnecessary words are eliminated by this segment. This removal is important because ISL needs only a meaningful sentence rather than unnecessary usage of linking verbs, helping verbs, and so on. After parsing through the eliminator segment, the sentence is sent to the concordance segment. This segment checks each word in the sentence and translates them into their respective lemma. Lemma is the basic requiring node of each word because sign language makes use of basic words irrespective of other languages that make use of gerund, suffixes, three forms of verbs, different kinds of nouns, adjectives, pronouns in their sentence theory. All the words of the sentence are checked in the lexicon which contains the English word with its HamNoSys notation and the words that are not in the lexicon are replaced by their synonym. The words of the sentence are replaced by their counter HamNoSys code. In case the word is not present in the lexicon, the HamNoSys code will be taken for each alphabet of the word in sequence. The HamNoSys code is converted into the SiGML tags (a form of XML tags) and these SiGML tags are then sent to the animation module which converts the SiGML code into the synthetic animation using avatar (computer-generated animation character).