The goal of our study is to explore which information is essential to understand virtual signing. To that aim, we developed an online test to assess the comprehensibility of four different versions of signers: a baseline version with a real human signer, a most complete version of a virtual signer, and two degraded versions of a virtual signer (one with non-visible hands and one without movements of head/trunk). Each video showed the description of a picture in French Sign Language (LSF). After having seen the video, participants had to find which picture had been described among 9 pictures displayed. The originality of our approach was to include two types of confusable pictures on the response board. One was supposed to induce errors by confounding the lexical signs and the other by confounding the spatial structure of the picture. In this way, we explored the effect of hiding hands and blocking trunk/head on the comprehension of lexicon and spatial structure.
Keywords
Future sign language technology user interfaces such as avatar technology
Online voting systems for signers
Avatar technology as a tool in sign language corpora and corpus data feeding into advances in avatar technology
@inproceedings{malala:18028:sign-lang:lrec,
author = {Malala, Vonjiniaina Domohina and Prigent, Elise and Braffort, Annelies and Berret, Bastien},
title = {Which Picture? A Methodology for the Evaluation of Sign Language Animation Understandability},
pages = {115--120},
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/18028.pdf}
}