The resources and technologies for Sign language processing of resourceful languages are emerging, while the low-resource languages are falling behind. Kurdish is a multi-dialect language, and it is considered a low-resource language. It is spoken by approximately 30 million people in several countries, which denotes that it has a large community with hearing-impairments as well. This paper reports on a project which aims to develop the necessary data and tools to process the Sign language for Sorani as one of the spoken Kurdish dialects. We present the results of developing a dataset in HamNoSys and its corresponding SiGML form for the Kurdish Sign lexicon. We use this dataset to implement a sign-supported Kurdish tool to check the accuracy of the Sign lexicon. We tested the tool by presenting it to hearing-impaired individuals. The experiment showed that 100% of the translated letters were understandable by a hearing-impaired person. The percentages were 65% for isolated words, and approximately 30% for the words in sentences. The data is publicly available at https://github.com/KurdishBLARK/KurdishSignLanguage for non-commercial use under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 licence
Keywords
Connecting sign language resources to language resources for spoken languages
Experiences in building sign language corpora
Elicitation methodology appropriate for corpus collection
In the Service of the Language Community – What is the value of sign language resources for the sign language community?
Use of (parallel) corpora and lexicons in translation studies and machine translation
Zina Kamal, Hossein Hassani. 2020. Towards Kurdish Text to Sign Translation. In Proceedings of the LREC2020 9th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Sign Language Resources in the Service of the Language Community, Technological Challenges and Application Perspectives, pages 117–122, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
BibTeX Export
@inproceedings{kamal:20029:sign-lang:lrec,
author = {Kamal, Zina and Hassani, Hossein},
title = {Towards {Kurdish} Text to Sign Translation},
pages = {117--122},
editor = {Efthimiou, Eleni and Fotinea, Stavroula-Evita and Hanke, Thomas and Hochgesang, Julie A. and Kristoffersen, Jette and Mesch, Johanna},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the {LREC2020} 9th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Sign Language Resources in the Service of the Language Community, Technological Challenges and Application Perspectives},
maintitle = {12th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC} 2020)},
publisher = {{European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}},
address = {Marseille, France},
day = {16},
month = may,
year = {2020},
isbn = {979-10-95546-54-2},
language = {english},
url = {https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/20029.pdf}
}