Phoebe Alexandra Pinney


2023

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English2BSL: A Rule-Based System for Translating English into British Sign Language
Phoebe Alexandra Pinney | Riza Batista-Navarro
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Language Technology for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion

British Sign Language (BSL) is a complex language with its own vocabulary and grammatical structure, separate from English. Despite its long-standing and widespread use by Deaf communities within the UK, thus far, there have been no effective tools for translating written English into BSL. This overt lack of available resources made learning the language highly inaccessible for most people, exacerbating the communication barrier between hearing and Deaf individuals. This paper introduces a rule-based translation system, designed with the ambitious aim of creating the first web application that is not only able to translate sentences in written English into a BSL video output, but can also serve as a learning aid to empower the development of BSL proficiency.