A machine translation system from Arabic sign language to Arabic
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A machine translation system from Arabic sign language to Arabic Hamzah Luqman1 · Sabri A. Mahmoud1
© Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2019
Abstract Arabic sign language (ArSL) is one of the sign languages that is used in Arab countries. This language has structure and grammar that differ from spoken Arabic. Available ArSL recognition systems perform direct mapping between the recognized sign in the ArSL sentence and its corresponding Arabic word. This results in persevering the structure and grammar of the ArSL sentence. ArSL translation involves converting the recognized ArSL sentence into Arabic sentence that meets the structure and grammar of Arabic. We propose in this work a rule-based machine translation system between ArSL and Arabic. The proposed system performs morphological and syntactic analysis to translate the ArSL sentence lexically and syntactically into Arabic. To evaluate this work, we perform manual and automatic evaluation using a corpus on the health domain. The obtained results show that our translation system provides an accurate translation for more than 80% of the translated sentences. Keywords Arabic sign language · ArSL · ArSL machine translation · Sign language translation · Sign language recognition
1 Introduction Sign language is the main communication language used by deaf and hearing-impaired people. Sign language is not universal as different sign languages are used in different countries such as American sign language (ASL), Dutch sign language (DSL), and Saudi sign language (SSL) [1]. The variation between sign languages can also be noticed in countries that share the same spoken languages such as ASL and British sign language (BSL). There are sometimes, regional variations in sign languages from city to city within the same country. In Arab countries, the community of hearing impaired comparatively forms about 4% of the population.1 This community uses several sign languages such as Jordanian, Egyptian, Yemeni, Saudi, and Omani. Although these languages may share some signs, as they coexist in the countries that have the same culture, the majority of the signs are different. To standardize these languages into one, the League of Arab * Hamzah Luqman [email protected] Sabri A. Mahmoud [email protected] 1
King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, Dhahran 31261, Saudi Arabia
States (LAS) and the Arab League Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization (ALECSO), in 1999, proposed a new sign language called Arabic Sign Language (ArSL). This language is presented with a dictionary of about 3200 signs published in two parts [2, 3]. Currently, ArSL is one of the languages used in Arab countries and it is used mainly in Arabic Gulf countries. It is the primary language used in Arabic news media. ArSL is completely distinct and independent from Arabic. It has its own grammar rules, syntax, and structure that are different from spoken Arabic. These differences increase the need for machine translation between ArSL and Arabic, in ad
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