sign-lang@LREC Anthology

Modeling and Predicting the Location of Pauses for the Generation of Animations of American Sign Language

Al-khazraji, Sedeeq | Kafle, Sushant | Huenerfauth, Matt


Volume:
Proceedings of the LREC2018 8th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Involving the Language Community
Venue:
Miyazaki, Japan
Date:
12 May 2018
Pages:
1–6
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
License:
CC BY-NC 4.0
sign-lang ID:
18013
ISBN:
979-10-95546-01-6

Content Categories

Languages:
American Sign Language
Corpora:
CUNY ASL Corpus

Abstract

Adding American Sign Language (ASL) animation to websites can improve information access for people who are deaf with low levels of English literacy. Given a script representing the sequence of ASL signs, we must generate an animation, but a challenge is selecting accurate speed and timing for the resulting animation. In this work, we analyzed motion-capture data recorded from human ASL signers to model the realistic timing of ASL movements, with a focus on where to insert prosodic breaks (pauses), based on the sentence syntax and other features. Our methodology includes extracting data from a pre-existing ASL corpus at our lab, selecting suitable features, and building machine learning models to predict where to insert pauses. We evaluated our model using cross-validation and compared various subsets of features. Our model had 80% accuracy at predicting pause locations, out-performing a baseline model on this task.

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Citation in ACL Citation Format

Sedeeq Al-khazraji, Sushant Kafle, Matt Huenerfauth. 2018. Modeling and Predicting the Location of Pauses for the Generation of Animations of American Sign Language. In Proceedings of the LREC2018 8th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Involving the Language Community, pages 1–6, Miyazaki, Japan. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).

BibTeX Export

@inproceedings{alkhazraji:18013:sign-lang:lrec,
  author    = {Al-khazraji, Sedeeq and Kafle, Sushant and Huenerfauth, Matt},
  title     = {Modeling and Predicting the Location of Pauses for the Generation of Animations of {American} {Sign} {Language}},
  pages     = {1--6},
  editor    = {Bono, Mayumi and Efthimiou, Eleni and Fotinea, Stavroula-Evita and Hanke, Thomas and Hochgesang, Julie A. and Kristoffersen, Jette and Mesch, Johanna and Osugi, Yutaka},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the {LREC2018} 8th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Involving the Language Community},
  maintitle = {11th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC} 2018)},
  publisher = {{European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}},
  address   = {Miyazaki, Japan},
  day       = {12},
  month     = may,
  year      = {2018},
  isbn      = {979-10-95546-01-6},
  language  = {english},
  url       = {https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/18013.pdf}
}
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