She can’t just look it up in a dictionary.Atleastnotyet.
Nash, a doctoral student at Boston University, is part of a team working on an interactive video project that would allow someone to demonstrate a sign in front of a camera, and have a computer program interpret and explain its meaning.
“Sometimes when I see a sign I don’t know it can be frustrating as you run around asking people and trying to find out what it is,” she said.
American Sign Language has no written form, and even though there are print and video ASL dictionaries, one needs to know the meaning of the word to look up the sign. That’s sort of like trying to figure out the meaning of a foreign word by looking it up under its English equivalent.
“I know from my own experience that it’s really hard if you see a sign that you don’t know, either in a class, in a video you’ve been assigned to watch, or even if you see it on the street, to figure out what it means, said linguistics professor Carol Neidle, one of the project’s lead researchers along with BU’s Stan Sclaroff and Vassilis Athitsos at the University of Texas-Arlington.
The researchers, working with a three-year, $900,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, are in the early stages of the project, capturing thousands of ASL words on video in a brightly lit Boston University lab.
The goal is to develop a lexicon of more than 3,000 signs. The meaning of each sign is not just determined by the shape of the hands, but the move- ments of the hands and arms, and even facial expressions.
As Nash scrolls through hundreds ofwords alphabetically in English sweep, sweetheart, swimming, sym- bol, system – Elizabeth Cassidy, a native ASL speaker, signs them for four cameras, three in front of her and one on her right. Two cameras shoot close-ups from different angles, and one takes awider shot.
Cassidy is one of four “linguistic consultants” who will eventually sign for the cameras.
Cassidy grew up in a family with three deaf siblings and was signing before she could speak, but even she sees unfamiliar signs once in a while.
“A project like this is a long time coming,” she said.
The goal is to use the technology to develop a multimedia ASL dictionary to help parents better communicate with deaf children, and to help sign language students.
There are more than 20 million Americans classified as either deaf or hard of hearing, nearly 1 million of whom are children.