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<Paper uid="P03-2018">
  <Title>A Prototype Text to British Sign Language (BSL) Translation System</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> During the last half century sign languages have been recognized as genuine languages. Thus sign languages are now accepted as minority languages, which coexist with majority languages (Neidle et al., 2000) and which are the native languages for many deaf people. Provision of information access and services in signed languages is as important as in other minority languages. Such provision, however, introduces theoretical and technical challenges. The use of a sign language gesture notation to drive virtual humans (avatars) for presenting signing has been investigated (Kennaway, 2001). Semi-automatic translation system from individual English sentences to such a sign language gesture notation has been demonstrated (self identifyinh references). Here, extension of this system to handle location of nominals at positions in the three dimensional space in front of the signer and noun verb agreement involving such allocated positions is described and illustrated.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1">  Sign Languages (SLs) involve simultaneous manual and non-manual components for conveying meaning. Non-manual features are comprised of the posture of the upper torso, the orientation of the head and facial expressions. Manual features have been often been decomposed as hand-shape, hand orientation, hand position and motion (Stokoe, 1978; Brien, 1992; Sutton-Spence and Woll, 1999). The Hamburg Notation System (HamNoSys) (Prillwitz et al., 1989; Hanke and Schmaling, 2001; Hanke, 2002) is an established phonetic transcription system for SLs comprising more than 200 iconically motivated symbols to describe these manual and non-manual features of signs.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> The manual components of signs are constrained to occur within signing space. Signing space is the three-dimensional space in front of the signer which extends vertically from above the signer's head to waist level, and horizontally from touching/close to the body to at arm's length in front of and to the side of the signer. Signs can be categorised in terms of the ways they use signing space. Body anchored and fixed nominal and verbal signs are either signed at a fixed body location or involve internal motion which allow relatively little modification to the sign. In contrast, some nominal signs can be signed at varying locations and thus the location where they are signed has significance. Furthermore, directional verbs allow grammatical and semantic information to be encoded within signing space such that the specific start and/or end positions of these signs have syntactic and semantic significance (Liddel, 1990).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> A further distinction can be made between topographic and syntactic use of space (Klima and Bel- null and Woll, 1999). In the case of the former, signing space is used to gesture towards and point at objects and persons physically present and thus has similarities with body anchored signs where the location at which a sign is made has an iconic/deictic function.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> However, in cases where the signer describes relationships between objects and persons which are not present, position within signing space can be used to denote abstract referents. Similarities between topographic and syntactic uses are apparent and often there is overlap between the two, and there is some evidence to suggest that, contrary to expectations, the granularity of the two may be comparable (Cormier, 2002). As our concerns are with translation from English text to sign language (and hence physical presence is not an issue) we concentrate on the syntactic uses of signing space.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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