Towards Kurdish Text to Sign Translation

Zina Kamal, Hossein Hassani


Abstract
The resources and technologies for Sign language processing of resourceful languages are emerging, while the low-resource languages are falling behind. Kurdish is a multi-dialect language, and it is considered a low-resource language. It is spoken by approximately 30 million people in several countries, which denotes that it has a large community with hearing-impairments as well. This paper reports on a project which aims to develop the necessary data and tools to process the Sign language for Sorani as one of the spoken Kurdish dialects. We present the results of developing a dataset in HamNoSys and its corresponding SiGML form for the Kurdish Sign lexicon. We use this dataset to implement a sign-supported Kurdish tool to check the accuracy of the Sign lexicon. We tested the tool by presenting it to hearing-impaired individuals. The experiment showed that 100% of the translated letters were understandable by a hearing-impaired person. The percentages were 65% for isolated words, and approximately 30% for the words in sentences. The data is publicly available at https://github.com/KurdishBLARK/KurdishSignLanguage for non-commercial use under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 licence
Anthology ID:
2020.signlang-1.19
Volume:
Proceedings of the LREC2020 9th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Sign Language Resources in the Service of the Language Community, Technological Challenges and Application Perspectives
Month:
May
Year:
2020
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Eleni Efthimiou, Stavroula-Evita Fotinea, Thomas Hanke, Julie A. Hochgesang, Jette Kristoffersen, Johanna Mesch
Venue:
SignLang
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
117–122
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.signlang-1.19
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zina Kamal and Hossein Hassani. 2020. Towards Kurdish Text to Sign Translation. In Proceedings of the LREC2020 9th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Sign Language Resources in the Service of the Language Community, Technological Challenges and Application Perspectives, pages 117–122, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Towards Kurdish Text to Sign Translation (Kamal & Hassani, SignLang 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.signlang-1.19.pdf
Code
 KurdishBLARK/KurdishSignLanguage