Multimedia sign language dictionary in the works

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This article was published 25/05/2008 (6428 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

BOSTON — Even though Joan Nash has been using American Sign Language for most of her life and has made a career of teaching deaf and hearing-impaired children, she is sometimes stumped when she encounters a sign she has never seen.

She can’t just look it up in a dictionary. At least not yet.

Nash, a doctoral student at Boston University, is part of a team working on an interactive video project that would allow someone to demonstrate a sign in front of a camera, and have a computer program interpret and explain its meaning.

“Sometimes when I see a sign I don’t know it can be frustrating as you run around asking people and trying to find out what it is,” she said.

American Sign Language has no written form, and even though there are print and video ASL dictionaries, one needs to know the meaning of the word to look up the sign. That’s like trying to figure out the meaning of a foreign word by looking it up under its English equivalent.

“I know from my own experience that it’s really hard if you see a sign that you don’t know, either in a class, in a video you’ve been assigned to watch, or even if you see it on the street, to figure out what it means,” said linguistics professor Carol Neidle, one of the project’s lead researchers along with BU’s Stan Sclaroff and Vassilis Athitsos at the University of Texas-Arlington.

The researchers, working with a three-year, $900,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, are in the early stages of the project, capturing thousands of ASL words on video in a brightly lit Boston University lab.

The goal is to develop a lexicon of more than 3,000 signs. The meaning of each sign is not just determined by the shape of the hands, but also the movements of the hands and arms, and even facial expressions.

The plan is to use the technology to develop a multimedia ASL dictionary to help parents better communicate with deaf children, and help sign language students.

— The Associated Press