Lorraine Leeson


2024

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SignON – a Co-creative Machine Translation for Sign and Spoken Languages (end-of-project results, contributions and lessons learned)
Dimitar Shterionov | Vincent Vandeghinste | Mirella Sisto | Aoife Brady | Mathieu De Coster | Lorraine Leeson | Andy Way | Josep Blat | Frankie Picron | Davy Landuyt | Marcello Scipioni | Aditya Parikh | Louis Bosch | John O’Flaherty | Joni Dambre | Caro Brosens | Jorn Rijckaert | Víctor Ubieto | Bram Vanroy | Santiago Gomez | Ineke Schuurman | Gorka Labaka | Adrián Núñez-Marcos | Irene Murtagh | Euan McGill | Horacio Saggion
Proceedings of the 25th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation (Volume 2)

SignON, a 3-year Horizon 20202 project addressing the lack of technology and services for MT between sign languages (SLs) and spoken languages (SpLs) ended in December 2023. SignON was unprecedented. Not only it addressed the wider complexity of the aforementioned problem – from research and development of recognition, translation and synthesis, through development of easy-to-use mobile applications and a cloud-based framework to do the “heavy lifting” as well as to establishing ethical, privacy and inclusivenesspolicies and operation guidelines – but also engaged with the deaf and hard of hearing communities in an effective co-creation approach where these main stakeholders drove the development in the right direction and had the final say.Currently we are witnessing advances in natural language processing for SLs, including MT. SignON was one of the largest projects that contributed to this surge with 17 partners and more than 60 consortium members, working in parallel with other international and European initiatives, such as project EASIER and others.

2023

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SignON: Sign Language Translation. Progress and challenges.
Vincent Vandeghinste | Dimitar Shterionov | Mirella De Sisto | Aoife Brady | Mathieu De Coster | Lorraine Leeson | Josep Blat | Frankie Picron | Marcello Paolo Scipioni | Aditya Parikh | Louis ten Bosch | John O’Flaherty | Joni Dambre | Jorn Rijckaert | Bram Vanroy | Victor Ubieto Nogales | Santiago Egea Gomez | Ineke Schuurman | Gorka Labaka | Adrián Núnez-Marcos | Irene Murtagh | Euan McGill | Horacio Saggion
Proceedings of the 24th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation

SignON (https://signon-project.eu/) is a Horizon 2020 project, running from 2021 until the end of 2023, which addresses the lack of technology and services for the automatic translation between sign languages (SLs) and spoken languages, through an inclusive, human-centric solution, hence contributing to the repertoire of communication media for deaf, hard of hearing (DHH) and hearing individuals. In this paper, we present an update of the status of the project, describing the approaches developed to address the challenges and peculiarities of SL machine translation (SLMT).

2022

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Language Planning in Action: Depiction as a Driver of New Terminology in Irish Sign Language
Rachel Moiselle | Lorraine Leeson
Proceedings of the LREC2022 10th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Multilingual Sign Language Resources

In this paper, we examine the linguistic phenomenon known as ‘depiction’, which relates to the ability to visually represent semantic components (Dudis, 2004). While some elements of this have been described for Irish Sign Language, with particular attention to the ‘productive lexicon’ (Leeson & Grehan, 2004; Leeson & Saeed, 2012; Matthews, 1996; O’Baoill & Matthews, 2000), here, we take the analysis further, drawing on what we have learned from cognitive linguistics over the past decade. Drawing on several recently developed domain-specific glossaries (e.g., STEM1, Covid-192, political domain, Sexual, Domestic and Gender Based Violence (SDGBV)-related vocabulary) we present ongoing analysis indicating that a deliberate focus on iconicity, in particular, elements of depiction, appears to be a primary driver. We also consider the potential implications of the insights we intend to gain from Deaf-led glossary glossary development work in the context of Machine Translation goals, for example, for work in progress on the Horizon 2020 funded SignON project.

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Sign Language Translation: Ongoing Development, Challenges and Innovations in the SignON Project
Dimitar Shterionov | Mirella De Sisto | Vincent Vandeghinste | Aoife Brady | Mathieu De Coster | Lorraine Leeson | Josep Blat | Frankie Picron | Marcello Paolo Scipioni | Aditya Parikh | Louis ten Bosh | John O’Flaherty | Joni Dambre | Jorn Rijckaert
Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation

The SignON project (www.signon-project.eu) focuses on the research and development of a Sign Language (SL) translation mobile application and an open communications framework. SignON rectifies the lack of technology and services for the automatic translation between signed and spoken languages, through an inclusive, humancentric solution which facilitates communication between deaf, hard of hearing (DHH) and hearing individuals. We present an overview of the current status of the project, describing the milestones reached to date and the approaches that are being developed to address the challenges and peculiarities of Sign Language Machine Translation (SLMT).

2021

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Defining meaningful units. Challenges in sign segmentation and segment-meaning mapping (short paper)
Mirella De Sisto | Dimitar Shterionov | Irene Murtagh | Myriam Vermeerbergen | Lorraine Leeson
Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Automatic Translation for Signed and Spoken Languages (AT4SSL)

This paper addresses the tasks of sign segmentation and segment-meaning mapping in the context of sign language (SL) recognition. It aims to give an overview of the linguistic properties of SL, such as coarticulation and simultaneity, which make these tasks complex. A better understanding of SL structure is the necessary ground for the design and development of SL recognition and segmentation methodologies, which are fundamental for machine translation of these languages. Based on this preliminary exploration, a proposal for mapping segments to meaning in the form of an agglomerate of lexical and non-lexical information is introduced.