Arab gloss annotation system for Arabic Sign Language

Sign Language (SL) is a native language for deaf person which are about 70 million around the world. 17 million of this community are only in Arabic world. Despite the very important number of deaf people, Arabic Sign Language (ArSL) suffers from the lack of rules and grammatical structure that is required for the construction of an ArSL sentence. In this context, our work, as a part of the project WebSign [1] developed in Latice laboratory, aims to define an intermediate text representation based on gloss annotation system to transcribe ArSL. WebSign is a Web application. It is based on the technology of avatar (animation in virtual world). The input of the system is a text in natural language. The output is a real-time and online interpretation in sign language [2][3]. This interpretation is constructed thanks to a dictionary of word and signs. In fact, this work is an annotation system that´s used to express many types of linguistic information like: type of the sentence, topic of the sentence and location of the sign.