http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/categories/signed/

Signs have three vectors. Hand shape, position, and movement. Once you get those down, only close homonyms (as it were) can be confused.

So, cool that it was done by computer, but I’m curious to why it was only 65% successful.

That’s interesting. Is there some advantage to BSL over closed captioning? Are there many people who are fluent in sign language but text-illiterate?

Sign languages are, with very few exceptions, only vaguely related or even completely unrelated to spoken languages. ASL is not “American English, transcribed to gestures”, and as far as I know, BSL isn’t either. They are their own languages, with their own grammatical structures and distinct vocabularies.

Written English is a second language for deaf children – and a very difficult one, because the child often has to learn the written form before learning the spoken form through lip reading.

To my knowledge, there is no written form of any sign language yet – short of video recordings. A tad inconvenient for filling out forms and writing books…

There was, or is, but it came about in the late eighties/early nineties, just in time to be eclipsed by the internet. That’s what I was referencing in my previous post.

Unfortunately, my google-fu is weak with this one…

Chevy Chase: And now, as a public service to those of our viewers who have difficulty with their hearing, I will repeat the top story of the day, aided by the Headmaster of the New York School for the Hard of Hearing, Garrett Morris.

[Garrett's face appears in a circle to Chevy's right]

Chevy Chase: Our top story tonight…

Garrett Morris: [screaming] OUR TOP STORY TONIGHT…

It’s apparently been abandoned by the Deaf in favor of the newer ‘sign writing’ (which IMHO looks cartoonish in comparison. I’ll have to study it to see if it offers any advantages.)

They want to use this software in order to generate “a very realistic signer”? Wouldn’t this technology be better applied to translate FROM sign language to text or spoken word rather than the opposite? No optical recognition is necessary to do what she says at 0:40, I don’t see how it applies and its pretty unimaginative.

the most amazing thing was that monitor mind reader, if your not familiar with it, search the net and think how frequencies can read your mind.

That’s only scratching the surface of the subtleties and complexities of the language that software designed solely to identify vocabulary would miss. You could literally write a book on what this software misses…

Signs have three vectors. Hand shape, position, and movement. Once you get those down, only close homonyms (as it were) can be confused. ”

There’s more now. If I remember correctly, there’s now accepted to be about 6 orthogonal vectors in sign language, and they don’t think they’ve found all of them yet. IIRC the list includes handshape, orientation, direction, repetition, positioning, and another one I can’t remember.

Also don’t forget that hands only convey about 50% of the meaning in sign lanuage – the other 50% is facial expressions, eye gaze, head position, etc etc.

And that’s without going into grammatical elements like indexing, referencing, topic marking, time lines, etc.

Basically, computer sign translation is always gonna be crap. Computers have a hard time translating spoken english into written english, or from one language into another, and that’s with the billions pumped into these use-cases.

The quality of these translations is so dire they’re only accepted straight with severe reluctance. Computerised sign translation is even worse, with far less money going into it. To say deaf people aren’t keen on it is a massive understatement.

I’m guessing that’s a joke, but I still remember when news broadcasts sometimes included a little picture-in-picture view of a person signing whatever the anchor was saying for the benefit of deaf viewers. They must have stopped doing that around the same time that somebody invented closed-captioning.

Sign language has a very complex grammar and inflectional system (there are a number of regional and national sign languages, but I feel fairly sure that most if not all of them fit that description; I know American Sign Language does). What the computer has done is akin to learning individual lexemes in a spoken language without knowing how to correctly put them together.