Speech into Sign Language Statistical Translation System for Deaf People

This paper presents a set of experiments used to develop a statistical system from translating speech to sign language for deaf people. This system is composed of an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system, followed by a statistical translation module and an animated agent that represents the different signs. Two different approaches have been used to perform the translations: a phrase-based system and a finite state transducer. For the evaluation, the followings figures have been considered: WER (Word Error Rate), BLEU and NIST. The paper presents translation results of reference sentences and sentences from the automatic speech recognizer. Also three different configurations have been evaluated for the speech recognizer. The best results were obtained with the finite state transducer, with a word error rate of 28.21% for the reference text, and 29.27% using the ASR output.