Automated Arabic-Arabic sign language translation system based on 3D avatar technology

Abstract

Arabic sign language (ArSL) is the natural language of the deaf community in Arabic countries. Deaf people have a set of difficulties due to poor services available. They have problems accessing essential information or receiving an education, communicating with other communities, and engaging in activities. Thus, a machine translation system of Arabic to ArSL has been developed using avatar technologies. Firstly, a dictionary of ArSL was constructed using eSign editor software. The constructed dictionary has three thousand signs. It can be adopted for the translation system in which written text can be transformed into sign language. The dictionary will be available as a free resource for researchers. It is complex and time-consuming, but it is an essential step in the machine translation of whole Arabic text to ArSL with 3D animations. Secondly, the translator has been developed. It performs syntactic and morphological analysis and then applies a set of rules to translate an Arabic text into ArSL text based on the structure and grammar of ArSL. The system is evaluated according to the parallel corpus that consists of 180 sentences using the metric for evaluation of translation with explicit ordering metric for evaluation of translation with explicit ordering(METEOR) our system achieves a relative score of (86%).