An Avatar Based Approach for Automatic Interpretation of Text to Sign Language

For deaf and hard of hearing people, learning any spoken language is not a natural or automatic process, it is rather a long and intensive task. As a matter of fact, the important differences between signed and oral languages significantly affect the ability of these individuals to develop their literacy skills and thus their knowledge and potential.

To address that issue, a number of systems for representing Sign Languages (SLs) in written form have been proposed. Most have become widely used among academics for linguistic research, while a few others have begun to be used as educational tools in some countries. Typically, these notations may inadvertently create confusion for novice readers because of their static nature and the special symbols that they use, so, displaying its contents in the form of video or animation of humanlike character would be beneficial to their users. In this context, we present in this paper a new approach for automatically interpreting a sign language notation using avatar technology. Sign Writing will be the focus of our work because it depicts the more suitable method that could satisfy the deaf needs than other notations and which is being taught formally in some schools.