Enhancing Portuguese Sign Language Animation with Dynamic Timing and Mouthing
This work addresses the challenge of creating more natural signing avatars for computational linguistics and human-computer interaction, though it is incremental as it builds on existing animation methods.
The paper tackled the problem of unnatural signing avatars by proposing a dynamic approach for transitions and mouthing animations in Portuguese Sign Language, finding that while native signers preferred dynamic transitions, it did not significantly improve comprehension or naturalness, but mouthing behaviors enhanced these aspects for novice learners.
Current signing avatars are often described as unnatural as they cannot accurately reproduce all the subtleties of synchronized body behaviors of a human signer. In this paper, we propose a new dynamic approach for transitions between signs, focusing on mouthing animations for Portuguese Sign Language. Although native signers preferred animations with dynamic transitions, we did not find significant differences in comprehension and perceived naturalness scores. On the other hand, we show that including mouthing behaviors improved comprehension and perceived naturalness for novice sign language learners. Results have implications in computational linguistics, human-computer interaction, and synthetic animation of signing avatars.