Bilingual resources for Moroccan Sign Language Generation and Standard Arabic Skills Improvement of Deaf Children

Abdelhadi Soudi, Corinne Vinopol, Kristof Van Laerhoven


Abstract
This paper presents a set of bilingual Standard Arabic (SA)-Moroccan Sign Language (MSL) tools and resources to improve Moroccan Deaf children’s SA skills. An MSL Generator based on rule-based machine translation (MT) is described that enables users and educators of Deaf children, in particular, to enter Arabic text and generate its corresponding MSL translation in both graphic and video format. The generated graphics can be printed and imported into an Arabic reading passage. We have also developed MSL Clip and Create software that includes a bilingual database of 3,000 MSL signs and SA words, a Publisher for the incorporation of MSL graphic support into SA reading passages, and six Templates that create customized bilingual crossword puzzles, word searches, Bingo cards, matching games, flashcards, and fingerspelling scrambles. A crowdsourcing platform for MSL data collection is also described. A major social benefit of the development of these resources is in relation to equity and the status of deaf people in Moroccan society. More appropriate resources for the bilingual education of Deaf children (in MSL and SA) will lead to improved quality of educational services.
Anthology ID:
2025.bucc-1.1
Volume:
Proceedings of the 18th Workshop on Building and Using Comparable Corpora (BUCC)
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Serge Sharoff, Ayla Rigouts Terryn, Pierre Zweigenbaum, Reinhard Rapp
Venues:
BUCC | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1–9
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.bucc-1.1/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Abdelhadi Soudi, Corinne Vinopol, and Kristof Van Laerhoven. 2025. Bilingual resources for Moroccan Sign Language Generation and Standard Arabic Skills Improvement of Deaf Children. In Proceedings of the 18th Workshop on Building and Using Comparable Corpora (BUCC), pages 1–9, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Bilingual resources for Moroccan Sign Language Generation and Standard Arabic Skills Improvement of Deaf Children (Soudi et al., BUCC 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.bucc-1.1.pdf