Modeling Global Body Configurations in American Sign Language
This work addresses the limited computational modeling for ASL, which is crucial for Deaf communities and language technology, but it is incremental as it builds on existing linguistic models.
The paper tackled the problem of modeling American Sign Language (ASL) by developing a Probabilistic Graphical Model based on the Movement-Hold Model, trained on the ASLing dataset, and evaluated its ability to model ASL phonetics.
American Sign Language (ASL) is the fourth most commonly used language in the United States and is the language most commonly used by Deaf people in the United States and the English-speaking regions of Canada. Unfortunately, until recently, ASL received little research. This is due, in part, to its delayed recognition as a language until William C. Stokoe's publication in 1960. Limited data has been a long-standing obstacle to ASL research and computational modeling. The lack of large-scale datasets has prohibited many modern machine-learning techniques, such as Neural Machine Translation, from being applied to ASL. In addition, the modality required to capture sign language (i.e. video) is complex in natural settings (as one must deal with background noise, motion blur, and the curse of dimensionality). Finally, when compared with spoken languages, such as English, there has been limited research conducted into the linguistics of ASL. We realize a simplified version of Liddell and Johnson's Movement-Hold (MH) Model using a Probabilistic Graphical Model (PGM). We trained our model on ASLing, a dataset collected from three fluent ASL signers. We evaluate our PGM against other models to determine its ability to model ASL. Finally, we interpret various aspects of the PGM and draw conclusions about ASL phonetics. The main contributions of this paper are