Computational Linguistics Commons^™

Improving Sign Recognition With Phonology, Lee Kezar, Jesse Thomason, Zed Sevcikova Sehyr

Communication Sciences and Disorders Faculty Articles and Research

We use insights from research on American Sign Language (ASL) phonology to train models for isolated sign language recognition (ISLR), a step towards automatic sign language understanding. Our key insight is to explicitly recognize the role of phonology in sign production to achieve more accurate ISLR than existing work which does not consider sign language phonology. We train ISLR models that take in pose estimations of a signer producing a single sign to predict not only the sign but additionally its phonological characteristics, such as the handshape. These auxiliary predictions lead to a nearly 9% absolute gain in sign recognition …

Chatgpt As Metamorphosis Designer For The Future Of Artificial Intelligence (Ai): A Conceptual Investigation, Amarjit Kumar Singh (Library Assistant), Dr. Pankaj Mathur (Deputy Librarian)

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

Abstract

Purpose: The purpose of this research paper is to explore ChatGPT’s potential as an innovative designer tool for the future development of artificial intelligence. Specifically, this conceptual investigation aims to analyze ChatGPT’s capabilities as a tool for designing and developing near about human intelligent systems for futuristic used and developed in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Also with the helps of this paper, researchers are analyzed the strengths and weaknesses of ChatGPT as a tool, and identify possible areas for improvement in its development and implementation. This investigation focused on the various features and functions of ChatGPT that …

Brazilian Portuguese-Russian (Braporus) Corpus: Automatic Transcription And Acoustic Quality Of Elderly Speech During Covid-19 Pandemic, Irina A. Sekerina, Anna Smirnova Henriques, Aleksandra Skorobogatova, Natalia Tyulina, Tatiana V. Kachkovskaia, Svetlana Ruseishvili, Sandra Madureira

Publications and Research

This article presents the Brazilian Portuguese-Russian (BraPoRus) corpus, whose goal is to collect, analyze, and preserve for posterity the spoken heritage Russian still used today in Brazil by approximately 1,500 elderly bilingual heritage Russian–Brazilian Portuguese speakers. Their unique 100-year-old variety of moribund Russian is disappearing because it has not been passed to their descendants born in Brazil. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we remotely collected 170 h of speech samples in heritage Russian from 26 participants (Mage = 75.7 years) in naturalistic settings using Zoom or a phone call. To estimate the quality of collected data, we focus on two methodological …

Automatic Transcription Of Northern Prinmi Oral Art: Approaches And Challenges To Automatic Speech Recognition For Language Documentation, Connor Bechler

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

One significant issue facing language documentation efforts is the transcription bottleneck: each documented recording must be transcribed and annotated, and these tasks are extremely labor intensive (Ćavar et al., 2016). Researchers have sought to accelerate these tasks with partial automation via forced alignment, natural language processing, and automatic speech recognition (ASR) (Neubig et al., 2020). Neural network—especially transformer-based—approaches have enabled large advances in ASR over the last decade. Models like XLSR-53 promise improved performance on under-resourced languages by leveraging massive data sets from many different languages (Conneau et al., 2020). This project extends these efforts to a novel context, applying …

Prácticas Comunicativas Digitales Y Construcción De Subjetividades: El Uso Del Podcast En La Escuela, María Isabel Guevara Rodríguez

Doctorado en Educación y Sociedad

No abstract provided.

An Interactive Visual Database For American Sign Language Reveals How Signs Are Organized In The Mind, Zed Sevcikova Sehyr, Ariel Goldberg, Karen Emmory, Naomi Caselli

Communication Sciences and Disorders Faculty Articles and Research

"We are four researchers who study psycholinguistics, linguistics, neuroscience and deaf education. Our team of deaf and hearing scientists worked with a group of software engineers to create the ASL-LEX database that anyone can use for free. We cataloged information on nearly 3,000 signs and built a visual, searchable and interactive database that allows scientists and linguists to work with ASL in entirely new ways."

The Asl-Lex 2.0 Project: A Database Of Lexical And Phonological Properties For 2,723 Signs In American Sign Language, Zed Sevcikova Sehyr, Naomi Caselli, Ariel M. Cohen-Goldberg, Karen Emmory

Communication Sciences and Disorders Faculty Articles and Research

ASL-LEX is a publicly available, large-scale lexical database for American Sign Language (ASL). We report on the expanded database (ASL-LEX 2.0) that contains 2,723 ASL signs. For each sign, ASL-LEX now includes a more detailed phonological description, phonological density and complexity measures, frequency ratings (from deaf signers), iconicity ratings (from hearing non-signers and deaf signers), transparency (“guessability”) ratings (from non-signers), sign and videoclip durations, lexical class, and more. We document the steps used to create ASL-LEX 2.0 and describe the distributional characteristics for sign properties across the lexicon and examine the relationships among lexical and phonological properties of signs. Correlation …

A Lexical Frequency Analysis Of Irish Sign Language, Robert G Smith, Markus Hofmann

Other Resources

Word frequency has a significant impact on language acquisition and fluency. It is often a point of reference for the teaching and assessing of a language and indeed, as a control for psycholinguistic studies. This paper presents the results of the first objective frequency analysis of lexical tokens from the Signs of Ireland corpus. We investigate the frequency of fully lexical, partly lexical and non-lexical signs in Irish Sign Language as they are presented in the corpus. We confirm the accuracy of the lexical gloss frequency data with a supplementary corpus subset that is tagged for grammatical class and additional …

Non-Manual Articulators In Irish Sign Language Verbs: An Analysis With Data Mining Association Rules, Robert G. Smith, Markus Hofmann

Conference Papers

The Signs of Ireland (SOI) corpus (Leeson et al., 2006) deploys a complex multi-tiered temporal data structure. The process of manually analyzing such data is laborious, cannot eliminate bias and often, important patterns can go completely unnoticed. In addition to this, as a result of the complex nature of grammatical structures contained in the corpus, identifying complex linguistic associations or patterns across tiers is simply too intricate a task for a human to carry out in an acceptable timeframe. This work explores the application of data mining techniques on a set of multi-tiered temporal data from the SOI corpus. Building …

Towards A Computational Model Of Frame Of Reference Alignment In Swedish Dialogue, Simon Dobnik, Christine Howes, Kim Demaret, John D. Kelleher

Conference papers

In this paper we examine how people negotiate, interpret and repair the frame of reference (FoR) in online text based dialogues discussing spatial scenes in Swedish. We describe work-in-progress in which participants are given different perspectives of the same scene and asked to locate several objects that are only shown on one of their pictures. This task requires participants to coordinate on FoR in order to identify the missing objects. This study has implications for situated dialogue systems.

Emotional Facial Expressions In Synthesised Sign Language Avatars: A Manual Evaluation., Robert G Smith, Brian Nolan

Other Resources

This research explores and evaluates the contribution that facial expressions might have regarding improved comprehension and acceptability in sign language avatars. Focusing specifically on Irish sign language (ISL), the Deaf (the uppercase ‘‘D’’ in the word ‘‘Deaf’’ indicates Deaf as a culture as opposed to ‘‘deaf’’ as a medical condition) community’s responsiveness to sign language avatars is examined. The hypothesis of this is as follows: augmenting an existing avatar with the seven widely accepted universal emotions identified by Ekman (Basic emotions: handbook of cognition and emotion. Wiley, London, 2005) to achieve underlying facial expressions will make that avatar more human-like …

The Role Of Emotional And Facial Expression In Synthesised Sign Language Avatars, Robert G Smith

Other Resources

This thesis explores the role that underlying emotional facial expressions might have in regards to understandability in sign language avatars. Focusing specifically on Irish Sign Language (ISL), we examine the Deaf community’s requirement for a visual-gestural language as well as some linguistic attributes of ISL which we consider fundamental to this research. Unlike spoken language, visual-gestural languages such as ISL have no standard written representation. Given this, we compare current methods of written representation for signed languages as we consider: which, if any, is the most suitable transcription method for the medical receptionist dialogue corpus. A growing body of work …

Relation Between Harappan And Brahmi Scripts, Subhajit Kumar Ganguly

Subhajit Kumar Ganguly

Around 45 odd signs out of the total number of Harappan signs found make up almost 100 percent of the inscriptions, in some form or other, as said earlier. Out of these 45 signs, around 40 are readily distinguishable. These form an almost exclusive and unique set. The primary signs are seen to have many variants, as in Brahmi. Many of these provide us with quite a vivid picture of their evolution, depending upon the factors of time, place and usefulness. Even minor adjustments in such signs, depending upon these factors, are noteworthy. Many of the signs in this list …

Lexicalization And De-Lexicalization Processes In Sign Languages: Comparing Depicting Constructions And Viewpoint Gestures, Kearsy Cormier, David Quinto-Pozos, Zed Sehyr, Adam Schembri

Communication Sciences and Disorders Faculty Articles and Research

In this paper, we compare so-called “classifier” constructions in signed languages (which we refer to as “depicting constructions”) with comparable iconic gestures produced by non-signers. We show clear correspondences between entity constructions and observer viewpoint gestures on the one hand, and handling constructions and character viewpoint gestures on the other. Such correspondences help account for both lexicalisation and de-lexicalisation processes in signed languages and how these processes are influenced by viewpoint. Understanding these processes is crucial when coding and annotating natural sign language data.