2017 Symposium on Sign Language Translation and Avatar Technology, Underground

This SLTAT met as the parallel session, "Fostering Deaf/hearing Communication through Avatar Technology" at HCI International in Vancouver, British Columbia. It considered issues related to research towards utilizing avatars for more effective communication between the Deaf and hearing communities. This includes novel approaches to generating signed language via avatars, advancements in corpus-based machine translation between signed and spoken language, and use cases involving avatars.will address issues related to research towards utilizing avatars for more effective communication between the Deaf and hearing communities. This includes novel approaches to generating signed language via avatars, advancements in corpus-based machine translation between signed and spoken language, and use cases involving avatars.

Here is the program, and links to the available presentations.

• An Improved Framework for Layering Linguistic Processes in Sign Language Generation: Why There Should Never Be a 'Brows' Tier. John McDonald, Rosalee Wolfe, Sarah Johnson, Souad Baowidan, Robyn Moncrief, Natalie Guo, DePaul University, United States
• Evaluation of Animated Swiss German Sign Language Fingerspelling Sequences and Signs. Sarah Ebling, University of Zurich, Switzerland; Sarah Johnson, Rosalee Wolfe, Robyn Moncrief, John McDonald, Souad Baowidan, DePaul University, United States; Tobias Haug, Sandra Sidler-Miserez, Katja Tissi, University of Applied Sciences of Special Needs Education, Switzerland
• Synthesizing Sign Language by Connecting Linguistically Structured Descriptions to a Multi-track Animation System. Michael Filhol, Limsi-CNRS, France; John McDonald, Rosalee Wolfe, DePaul University, United States
• Sign Search and Sign Synthesis Made Easy to End User; the Paradigm of Building a SL Oriented Interface for Accessing and Managing Educational Content. Eleni Efthimiou, Stavroula-Evita Fotinea, Panos Kakoulidis, Theodore Goulas, Athansia-Lida Dimou, Anna Vacalopoulou, Institute for Language and Speech Processing / ATHENA RC, Greece
• Coarticulation Analysis for Sign Language Synthesis. Lucie Naert, Caroline Larboulette, Sylvie Gibet, IRISA, France
• Investigation of Feature Elements and Performance Improvement for Sign Language Recognition by Hidden Markov Model. Tatsunori Ozawa, Hirotoshi Shibata, Hiromitsu Nishimura, Hiroshi Tanaka, Kanagawa Institute of Technology, Japan