TY - JOUR T1 - Proposing a Speech to Gesture Translation Architecture for Spanish Deaf mute People JF - Journal of Visual Languages and Computing Y1 - 2008 A1 - San Segundo, Ruben A1 - Juan Manuel Montero A1 - Javier Macias-Guarasa A1 - Ricardo Cordoba A1 - Javier Ferreiros A1 - Jose Manuel Pardo KW - animated agents KW - animation KW - gesture complexity KW - lifelike characters KW - spanish sign language KW - speech to gesture translation AB -

This article describes an architecture for translating speech into Spanish Sign Language (SSL). The architecture proposed is made up of four modules: speech recognizer, semantic analysis, gesture sequence generation and gesture playing. For the speech recognizer and the semantic analysis modules, we use software developed by IBM and CSLR
(Center for Spoken Language Research at University of Colorado), respectively. Gesture sequence generation and gesture animation are the modules on which we have focused our main effort. Gesture sequence generation uses semantic concepts (obtained from the semantic analysis) associating them with several SSL gestures. This association is carried out based on a number of generation rules. For gesture animation, we have developed an animated agent (virtual representation of a human person) and a strategy for reducing the effort in gesture animation. This strategy consists of making the system automatically generate all agent positions necessary for the gesture animation. In this process, the system uses a few main agent positions (two or three per second) and some interpolation strategies, both issues previously generated by the service developer (the person who adapts the architecture proposed in this paper to a specific domain). Related to this module, we propose a distance between agent positions and a measure of gesture complexity. This measure can be used to analyze the gesture perception versus its complexity. With the architecture proposed, we are not trying to build a domain independent translator but a system able to translate speech utterances into gesture sequences in a restricted domain: railway, flights or weather information.

PB - Elsevier CY - Reino Unido de Gran BretaƱa e Irlanda del Norte VL - 19 UR - http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6WMM-4P5R60V-1&_user=885393&_coverDate=10%2F31%2F2008&_rdoc=2&_fmt=high&_orig=browse&_srch=doc-info(%23toc%236938%232008%23999809994%23700268%23FLA%23display%23Volume)&_cdi=6938&_sort=d&_docanchor= IS - 588 ER -