The translation of English text into American Sign Language (ASL) animation tests the limits of traditional machine translation (MT) approaches. The generation of spatially complex ASL phenomena called “classifier predicates” motivates a new representation for ASL based on virtual reality modeling software, and previous linguistic research provides constraints on the design of an English-to- Classifier-Predicate translation process operating on this representation. This translation design can be incorporated into a multi- pathway architecture to build English-to-ASL MT systems capable of producing classifier predicates.
@inproceedings{huenerfauth:04006:sign-lang:lrec,
author = {Huenerfauth, Matt},
title = {Spatial Representation of Classifier Predicates for Machine Translation into {American} {Sign} {Language}},
pages = {24--31},
editor = {Streiter, Oliver and Vettori, Chiara},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the {LREC2004} Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: From {SignWriting} to Image Processing. Information techniques and their implications for teaching, documentation and communication},
maintitle = {4th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC} 2004)},
publisher = {{European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}},
address = {Lisbon, Portugal},
day = {30},
month = may,
year = {2004},
language = {english},
url = {https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/04006.pdf}
}