UT Arlington project aims to make American Sign Language learning
easier
Monday, February 4, 2008
UT Arlington project aims to make American Sign Language learning
easier
By Pegasus News wire
A UT Arlington assistant professors research project will develop
methods to aid in learning American Sign Language (ASL) by both deaf
and hearing individuals through $900,000 in National Science
Foundation funding during the next three years.
Vassilis Athitsos who is in the UT Arlington Computer Science and
Engineering Department, and will work with Drs. Stan Sclaroff and
Carol Neidle of Boston Universitys Computer Science Department
will create tools and methods to aid in the learning process for ASL.
Unlike a spoken or written language, ASL is not a literal
representation of each word, so a complete sentence can be presented
very rapidly. This often makes it difficult for students of ASL to
grasp the quickly changing hand positions and gestures. The project
will involve two significant developments.
The first is the creation of search technologies for looking up the
meaning of an unknown sign. Currently available sign/meaning
dictionaries organize entries in alphabetical order. The teams
proposed methods can be incorporated into any existing dictionary to
allow sign-based look up, a capability that no dictionary currently
has.
Developed through the use of computer vision, data mining and machine
learning applications, the dictionary will contain approximately 4,000
commonly-used signs and should be deployable within three years. This
will allow non-ASL users to more easily match gestures with meanings
and study visual patterns.
The second goal is the development of a visual database and an
automatic search tool for identifying occurrences of signs in large
video databases of ASL content sort of a visual equivalent of
GOOGLE. It will allow users to search databases for occurrences of
thousands of signs.
This would involve large-scale machine learning integrating methods
for accurate sign recognition with methods for efficient indexing.
These applications would be of potential use to everyone
communicating with ASL, Dr. Athitsos said. Children, parents,
teachers, doctors; they could all potentially benefit from the sign
lookup and search methods we are developing. For example, it should
be very useful for a parent to be able to look up the meaning of a
sign that their deaf child has just performed, or perhaps for a
doctor to understand signs used by a deaf patient.
Source: UTA
Link:
http://www.pegasusnews.com/news/2008/feb/04/ut-arlington-project-aims-make-american-sign-langu/?print
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