This paper presents work carried out to transform glosses of a fable in Italian Sign Language (LIS) into a text which is then read by a TTS synthesizer from an SSML modified version of the same text. Whereas many systems exist that generate sign language from a text, we decided to do the reverse operation and generate text from LIS. For that purpose we used a version of the fable The Tortoise and the Hare, signed and made available on Youtube by ALBA cooperativa sociale, which was annotated manually by second author for her master’s thesis. In order to achieve our goal, we converted the multilayer glosses into linear Prolog terms to be fed to the generator. In the paper we focus on the main problems encountered in the transformation of the glosses into a semantically and pragmatically consistent representation. The main problems have been caused by the complexities of a text like a fable which requires coreference mechanisms and speech acts to be implemented in the representation which are often unexpressed and constitute implicit information.

This paper introduces work carried out for the automatic generation of a written text in Italian starting from glosses of a fable in Italian Sign Language (LIS). The paper gives a brief overview of sign languages (SLs) and some peculiarities of SL fables such as the use of space, the strategy of Role Shift and classifiers. It also presents the annotation of the fable “The Tortoise and the Hare” - signed in LIS and made available by Alba Cooperativa Sociale -, which was annotated manually by first author for her master’s thesis. The annotation was the starting point of a generation process that allowed us to automatically generate a text in Italian starting from LIS glosses. LIS sentences have been transcribed with Italian words into tables on simultaneous layers, each of which contains specific linguistic or non-linguistic pieces of information. In addition, the present work discusses problems encountered in the annotation and generation process.