Translating Italian connectives into Italian Sign Language

Camillo Lugaresi and Barbara Di Eugenio

The 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2013)
Sofia, Bulgaria, August 4-9, 2013

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Abstract

We present a corpus analysis of how Italian connectives are translated into LIS, the Italian Sign Language. Since corpus resources are scarce, we propose an alignment method between the syntactic trees of the Italian sentence and of its LIS translation. This method, and clustering applied to its outputs, highlight the different ways a connective can be rendered in LIS: with a corresponding sign, by affecting the location or shape of other signs, or being omitted altogether. A machine learning model based on decision trees shows how these findings can be translated into a computational model that will be integrated into the pipeline of an existing Italian-LIS rendering system. Initial experiments to learn the four possible translations with Decision Trees give promising results.

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