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| April 2007 |
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SU staff member helps with computerised sign language projectEngela Duvenhage
A hearing impaired staff member of Stellenbosch University's (SU)' Facility Management Division, Mr Bennie Botha, is playing an important part in helping a German computer scientist establishing a computerised sign language project. Mr Jan Bungeroth, a doctoral student from RWTH Aachen University in Germany, is building up a corpus of South African Sign Language signs, focusing on airport related information, with English as source language and sign language as target language. It will be used to import specific sentences containing flight information into a machine translation system, which will export it into sign language by displaying an animated figure on a computer screen. He uses Mr Botha, a draughtsman working at Facility Management, to sign specific sentences that are often heard over the intercom in an airport context. Mr Botha's hand signs and facial expressions are videotaped and fed into the computer programme. "We use it to establish specific linguistic rules for South African Sign Language," Jan explains. For his doctoral research work Jan developed a computer programme that translates German sentences about weather conditions into German Sign Language. He uses the examples of flight data to see if his programme can also be used for other languages. This seems easier said than done, as sign language differs from country to country. Jan uses a similar statistical machine based translation programme to that used by Google to translate text from one language to another. Jan became interested in the field when he visited computer scientist Dr Lynette van Zijl of Stellenbosch University's Department of Mathematical Sciences in the Faculty of Science five years ago as part of his Diplomarbeit (the German equivalent of an MSc thesis). Dr van Zijl and her students are involved in the South African Sign Language project to create a virtual speaker (also called a graphic avatar) that is able to translate unambiguous English text or instructions into sign language. When completed, the project and its computerised figure could also be used to teach people without hearing problems how to sign. "This can help a lot in a country like South Africa where literacy is a problem," Dr van Zijl explains. "We find that people with hearing problems often cannot read in the same way or at the same speed as hearing people, because they are not exposed to spoken language in the same way." According to Dr van Zijl, this means that captions that flash across a television screen during news bulletins, for instance, are often too fast to be comprehensibly read by hearing impaired people. Jan says that his programme still needs a lot of work before it can be used, as he still needs to make his avatar more user-friendly. "It is extremely important to translate information correctly. This is easier to do in unambiguous context with unambiguous information, such as at airports and for weather bulletins, but not at all practical in situations such as court rooms," he explains. A basic list of 500 words in South African Sign Language is already available on Dr van Zijl's website http://www.cs.sun.ac.za/~lynette/SASL/ More information:
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Dr Lynette vaan Zijl - Department of Mathematical Sciences, Stellenbosch
University