Towards a One-Way American Sign Language Translator



R. Martin McGuire , Jose Hernandez-Rebollar , Thad Starner ,Valerie Henderson , Helene Brashear , and Danielle S. Ross
GVU Center
Georgia Tech
Atlanta, GA 30332
haileris,thad,vlh,brashear@cc.gatech.edu

Engineering and Applied Science
George Washington University
Washington, DC 20052
jreboll@gwu.edu

Abstract
Inspired by the Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency’s (DARPA) recent successes in speech recognition,
we introduce a new task for sign language recognition research: a mobile one-way American Sign Language translator. We argue that such a device should be feasible in thenext few years, may provide immediate practical benefits forthe Deaf community, and leads to a sustainable program ofresearch comparable to early speech recognition efforts. We
ground our efforts in a particular scenario, that of a Deaf
individual seeking an apartment and discuss the system requirements and our interface for this scenario. Finally, we
describe initial recognition results of 94% accuracy on a
141 sign vocabulary signed in phrases of fours signs using
a one-handed glove-based system and hidden Markov models (HMMs).

1. Introduction
Twenty–eight million Deaf and hard–of–hearing individuals form the largest disabled group in the United States.
Everyday communication with the hearing population posesa major challenge to those with hearing loss. Most hearing people do not know sign language and know very little
about deafness in general. For example, most hearing people do not know how to communicate in spoken languagewith a Deaf or hard–of–hearing person who can speak andread lips (e.g. that they should not turn their head or cover
their mouths). Although many Deaf people lead successful and productive lives, overall, this communication barrier can have detrimental effects on many aspects of theirlives. Not only can person–to–person communication barriers impede everyday life (e.g. at the bank, post office, or
grocery store), but essential information about health, employment, and legal matters is often inaccessible.

Brain and Cognitive Sciences
University of Rochester
Rochester, NY 14627
psycholing@earthlink.net

Common current options for alternative communication
modes include cochlear implants, writing, and interpreters.
Cochlear implants are not a viable option for all Deaf people. In fact, only 5.3% of the deaf population in America has
a cochlear implant, and of those, 10.1% of these individuals no longer use their implant (complaints cited are similar
to those of hearing aides) [2]. The ambiguity of handwriting and slowness of writing makes it a very frustrating modeof communication. Conversational rates (both spoken andsigned) range from between 175 to 225 WPM, while handwriting rates range from 15 to 25 WPM [5]. In addition,
English is often the Deaf person’s second language, American Sign Language (ASL) being their first. Although many
Deaf people achieve a high level of proficiency in English,
not all Deaf people can communicate well through written
language. Since the average Deaf adult reads at approximately a fourth grade level [1, 9], communication throughwritten English can be too slow and often is not preferred.
Interpreters are commonly used within the Deaf community, but interpreters can charge high hourly rates andbe awkward in situations where privacy is of high concern,such as at a doctor or lawyer’s office. Interpreters for Deaf
people with specialized vocabularies, such as a PhD in Mechanical Engineering, can be difficult to find and very expensive. It can also be difficult to find an interpreter in unforeseen emergencies where timely communication is extremely important, such as car accidents.

2. The One-Way Translator
Our goal is to offer a sign recognition system as anotherchoice of augmenting communication between the Deaf andhearing communities. We seek to implement a mobile, self–contained system that a Deaf user could use as a limited interpreter. This wearable system would capture and recognize the Deaf user’s signing. The user could then cue thesystem to generate speech for the hearing listener. However,this idea is complicated with the problem of machine translation of ASL to English. To help constrain the problem, we
assume the signer will use Contact Sign.

2.1. Language Modeling
American Sign Language (ASL) grammar is significantly different than English grammar, and many hearing
students of ASL have difficulty with its complex features
if they learn it after early childhood. Thus, native signers (someone who has learned from birth and is fully fluent) will often use contact signing, which uses many of thegrammatical features of English and less of ASL, when encountering hearing signers [11]. By using Contact Sign, we
reduce the complexity of the language set we are seeking torecognize, while maintaining a language set that is alreadyfamiliar to the Deaf community as a tool for when communicating with the hearing.
We choose to further constrain the problem by leveraging the idea of “formulaic” language. Formulaic language is language that is ritualized or prefabricated. It includes routines, idioms, set phrases, rhymes, prayers andproverbs[16]. The DARPA one–way speech translation systems used by peace–keeping troops, maritime law enforcement, and doctors uses this idea to ask questions designed
for specific responses. The system provides translations ofpredetermined phrases designed to provide information orelicit feedback. Informative phrases include sentences like
“I am here to help you” and “The doctor will be here soon”.
Requests and questions include “Please raise your hand if
you understand me”, “Is anybody hurt?” and “Are you carrying a weapon?”[12]. Requests and questions are limited tothose whose answers involve simple gestures, such as nodding yes/no, pointing, or raising a number of fingers (e.g.
“How many children do you have?”).
Cox describes a system, TESSA, that combines formulaic language with speech recognition and semantic phrase
analysis to generate phrases in British Sign Language for
Deaf customers at the post office [4]. A set of formulaic language phrases were compiled from observed interactions at
the post office. These phrases were then translated into sign
and recorded on video. The postal employee speaks to asystem that performs speech recognition and uses semantic
mapping to choose the most likely phrase. The clerk may
say “Interest in the UK is tax free”, and the system would
cue the phrase “All interest is free of UK income tax” which
would then reference the video of a signed translation for
the Deaf customer to see.
The use of formulaic language allows for a reduction in
vocabulary size and allows for better error handling. Cox
showed a progressive decrease in error rates for the language processor, by allowing a user to select from larger

N best lists: 1–best was 9.7%, 3–best was 3.8% and 5–best
was 2.8% [4]. The application of the phrase selection options also resulted in a significant increase in user satisfaction with the system.
One of the reasons for TESSA’s success was its limited
domain. After consulting with members of the Deaf community, several scenarios were suggested where the one–way ASL to English translator may be beneficial: doctor’s/lawyer’s office, emergency situations such as car accidents, navigation in airports, and shopping for an apartment. We chose the last scenario due to its interactive nature and potentially limited vocabulary.
The apartment-hunting scenario is similar to the speech
recognition community’s Airline Travel Information Service (ATIS) scenario [7] where users would try to solve specific airline travel problems using speech access to a computerized database. Early versions of ATIS were actually“Wizard of Oz” studies where a human would be substituted for the computer to respond to the user’s requests.
In this way the experimenters could elicit “natural” speechfrom the subjects to determine what vocabulary should be
included in the the actual speech recognition system. Thus,
with a vocabulary of a few thousand words tuned to the specific scenario, the ATIS speech recognition system could
give the user the impression of a unlimited vocabulary. We
intend to perform similar studies with members of the Deaf
community to determine the appropriate vocabulary for theapartment-hunting task.

2.2. Interface
In order to begin exploring the feasibility of a one-way
translator, we are working on both the interface as well as
the recognition components simultaneously. A preliminaryinterface is necessary to perform Wizard of Oz studies andelicit natural sign in the context of the apartment-hunting
task. In addition, the preliminary interface generates useful feedback from the Deaf community.
Figure 1 shows an early prototype of the one-way translator. While the system shown is based on computer vision
only (note the camera in the hat), the image demonstrates
the head-up display used to provide a visual interface to theuser while he signs. An early finding from interacting with
the Deaf community is that the display should be mounted
on the non-dominant-hand side of the signer to avoid collision during signs made around the face.
Figures 2-5 demonstrate a typical progression of the current interface during translation. Note that the interface isbeing designed for a hybrid computer vision and accelerometer approach where the signer wears a camera in a hat
aimed at his or her hands, as in Figure 1. Thus, a video
image from the camera is included in the interface so thatthe signer knows when the system is successfully tracking

Figure 1. Prototype one-way translator (vision system only shown). The head-up display provides a 640x480 color interface forthe signer.

his hands. Figure 2 shows the initial screen for the translator. To start the system, the signer clicks a button mounted
on his wrist. Such an interface may be implemented as partof a Bluetooth enabled wristwatch. At present, the interface is emulated with the buttons of a small optical mouse.
As the user signs (Figure 3), the system collects data until the user clicks the wrist button again to indicate the endof the phrase. The user can also click a second button on thewrist to re-start the process. After clicking the stop signing button, the system recognizes the signed phrase, determines the most similar phrases in English from its phrase
list, and allows the signer to select between them using awrist mounted jog-dial (Figure 4). Note that these phrases
could be displayed as a series of miniature sign language
icons for signers completely unfamiliar with written English. Once the signer selects the closest phrase, the system speaks the phrase, showing its progress in bar as shownin Figure 5. The signer can interrupt the system or repeat
the English phrase as desired.
While this interface is preliminary, it has been used fora simple demonstration recognizer combining computer vision and wrist-mounted accelerometers. Testing with native
signers is necessary to determine if the system is acceptable
to the community and if it can be used to reach conversational speeds. However, initial reaction has been positive.

3. Sign Language Recognition
In the past, we have demonstrated a HMM based sign
language recognition system limited to a forty word vocabulary and a controlled lighting environment [13]. The user

Figure 2. Initial screen for the translator. To
start the system, the signer clicks a button
mounted on the wrist.

Figure 3. The system collects data as theuser signs a phrase.

wore a hat–mounted camera to capture their signing. Data
sets were taken in a controlled laboratory environment withstandard lighting and background. The images were thenprocessed on a desktop system and recognized in real–time.
The system was trained on a 40 word vocabulary consistingof samples of verbs, nouns, adjectives, and pronouns andreached accuracy of 97.8% on an independent test set using a rule–based grammar.
However, this system was more appropriate to laboratory conditions than to a mobile environment. More recently, we have shown that combining accelerometer-based
sensing with a computer vision hand-tracking system maylead to better results in the harsh situations typical of mobile sensing [3]. The systems are complementary in that thehat-based vision system tracks the hands in a plane parallel to the ground while the wrist-worn accelerometers, acting as tilt sensors due to the acceleration due to gravity, pro-

Figure 4. The signer selects among potential
phrase translations.

Figure 6. The Acceleglove. Five micro twoaxis accelerometers mounted on rings readfinger flexion. Two more in the back of thepalm measure orientation. Not shown are twopotentiometers which measure bend at theshoulder and elbow and another two-axis accelerometer which measures the upper arm
angles.

phrase-level recognition with a 141 sign vocabulary. Our
goal is to prove the feasibility of a phrase level ASL oneway translator using a mobile apparatus. A high word accuracy in a continuous sign recognition task with this system
would suggest that a mobile phrase level translator is possible.

4. Recognition Experiment
Figure 5. The translator speaks the selected
English phrase.

vide information as to the angle of the hands in the verticalplane.
The Acceleglove (see Figure 6) provides another approach to mobile sign recognition. Accelerometers on theindividual fingers, wrist, and upper arm provide orientation
and acceleration information with respect to each other andpotentiometers at the elbow and shoulder provide information as to the hand’s absolute position with respect to thebody. In previous work [8], the Acceleglove system wasshown to recognize 176 signs in isolation using decision
trees. Many signs are taught with a beginning hand shape, amovement, and an ending hand shape. With the Acceleglove
system, the user makes the initial hand shape, and the recognizer shows which signs correspond to that hand shape.
The system eliminates signs interactively as the user proceeds with the movement and end hand shape.
In this paper, we combine the Acceleglove hardware with
the Georgia Tech Gesture Toolkit (GT2K) [15] to attempt

Acquiring data with which to train our system beganwith choosing a set of signs to recognize. Since the Acceleglove was already part of an existing recognition system,a subset of signs was chosen from the list of signs understood by the original system. These signs were then organized into parts of speech groups of noun, pronoun, adjective, and verb for a total of 141 signs. Using a fairly rigid
grammar of ”noun/pronoun verb adjective noun”, a list of
665 sentences was generated, ensuring that each sign appeared in the data at least 10 times.
To capture the sign data, the original Acceleglove recognition program was altered to include user prompts and tolog the data from the glove’s sensors. The signer sat in frontof the capturing computer at a fixed distance, wearing theglove on his right arm, and holding in his left a pair of
buttons attached to the glove, with both arms on the armrests of the chair. The program displayed the sentence to besigned, and when the signer was ready, he would press oneof the buttons to begin capture. At the end of the sentence,the signer would return his arms to the armrests, and press
the other button to signify that the sentence had ended. The
computer would then save the captured data to a numberedfile, and increment to the next sentence in the list. This pro-Grammarpart–of–speech
unrestricted

Testing on training
98.05%
94.19%

Indep. test set
94.47%
87.63%

Table 1. Sign accuracies based on a part–of–
speech and an unrestricted grammar.

cess was repeated for all 665 sentences, with a camera filming the process to aid in the identifying incorrect signs.
Training of the HMM-based recognizer was done with
GT2K [15]. After filtering the data to account for irregular frame–rates from the glove, the data was labeled using the sentence list. To minimize the impact of the signer’s
arms beginning and ending at the chair armrests, the “signs”
start–sentence and end–sentence were added to the recognition list. A pair of grammars was created. The first follows the same parts of speech based form used to generate
the sentence list, surrounded by the start–sentence and endsentence signs. The second was a more unrestricted grammar, looking only for the start–sentence sign, followed byany number of any of the signs in the vocabulary, followedby the end–sentence sign. A set of training and testing sets
were created using a randomly selected 90% of the data
for training and the remaining 10% for model validation.
The model was then trained with the automatic trainer. Sign
boundaries were re-estimated over several iterations to ensure better training. After training, the models were tested
against the remaining 10% of the sentences. Recognition accuracy was determined, with the standard penalties for substitutions, insertions, and deletions. This process of training
and testing was repeated 21 times, yielding an overall accuracy based on the average of each of the 21 sets. The models
created were each tested with both the strict and the unrestricted grammars, resulting in accuracy ratings of 94.47%
average for the strict grammar and 87.63% average for theunrestricted. An additional model was created, using all of
the data for training and all of the data again for testing.
Accuracy ratings for this testing–on–training model were
94.19% for the unrestricted grammar, 98.05% for the strict(see Table 1).
Accuracy was determined following the standard speech
recognition formula of




where N is the number of signs, D is the number of deletions, I is the number of insertions, and S is the number ofsubstitutions. Note that only substitutions are possible withthe strict part–of–speech grammar.

5. Discussion and Future WorkThe results above are very promising. HMM recognition
systems tend to scale logarithmically with the size of the
vocabulary in both speed and accuracy. Since ASL has approximately 6000 commonly used signs, the pattern recognition framework of this project should be scalable to thelarger task. In addition, there is a significant amount of workin the spoken language community for applying context,
grammar, and natural language frameworks to HMM recognizers. Hopefully, this prior work will allow rapid adoption of such framework for ASL. Even so, ASL is significantly different from spoken language in that it allows spatial memory and spatial comparisons. In addition, face andbody gestures communicate a significant amount of information in ASL. Thus, we expect this field to be a challenge
for many years in the future.
The results suggest the feasibility of our goal of a phrase
level translator. A phrase level translator with the interface
described previously has significant tolerance to individual
sign errors. The system simply needs to recognize enoughof the signs so that the closest phrase is returned in the top
few choices for the user to select. Hopefully, the planned
Wizard of Oz studies will show that a relatively low number of phrases and signs are necessary to handle most situations in the apartment-hunting scenario. However, as soon
as this sign and phrase lexicon is gathered, the system will
be tested against these phrases as signed by multiple native signers. These experiments will help to further refine
the models as well as to produce an initial automatic recognition system that can be used to test the translator in situ.
As the system improves, more signers can experiment withthe system, and a larger corpus develops. If the system issuccessful with the apartment-hunting scenario, we hope to
expand the translator’s scope to other scenarios of concern
to the Deaf community. In this way we hope to copy themodel of the speech recognition community which leveraged its success in the ATIS task to more difficult scenarios
such as taking dictation.
We also expect to experiment with the translator apparatus. We wish to combine the Acceleglove system witha computer vision system to determine which features andsigns each system can best recognize. In addition, we will
discuss the various wearable hardware options with members of the Deaf community to determine which options aremost desirable. Finally, we will improve the translator interface as we gain more experience in making practical systems with the community.

6. Related Work
Following a similar path to early speech recognition,
many early attempts at machine sign language recognition

concentrated on isolated signs or fingerspelling. Space does
not permit a thorough review, but, in general, most current systems rely on instrumented gloves or a desktop-based
camera system. Before 1995 most systems employed a formof template matching or neural nets for recognition; however, many current systems now employ HMMs.
In 1998, Liang and Ouhyoung’s work in Taiwanese Sign
Language [10] showed very encouraging results with aglove-based recognizer. This HMM-based system recognizes 51 postures, 8 orientations, and 8 motion primitives.
When combined, these constituents can form a lexiconof 250 words which can be continuously recognized inreal-time with 90.5% accuracy. At ICCV’98, Vogler andMetaxas described a desk-based 3D camera system that
achieves 89.9% word accuracy on a 53 word lexicon [14].
Since the vision process is computationally expensive inthis implementation, an electromagnetic tracker is used interchangeably with the three mutually orthogonal calibrated
cameras for collecting experimental data. Most recently at
ICMI2003, Fang, Gao, and Zhao discussed a decision tree
and SOFM/HMM recognizer that achieved approximately
91% accuracy on isolated Chinese Sign Language signs in a
5113-sign vocabulary [6]. This system is restricted to deskbased use as it employs two fully instrumented Cybergloves
and three Polhemus six degree of freedom trackers.

7. Conclusion
We have introduced the concept of a one-way sign tospoken translator as a suitable task for sign language recognition research. We have demonstrated a preliminary system for phrase-level sign recognition with a per sign accuracy of 94%, suggesting that sufficiently large vocabularies
and high enough accuracies are possible for a mobile oneway American Sign Language to English translator in a limited domain. Finally, we have discussed an interface designfor the one-way translator that puts the signer-in-the-loop
for selecting and verifying the appropriate phrase translation.

Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank John Makhoul for his
discussions which led to the one-way translator task.

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