A Survey and Critique of American Sign Language Natural Language Generation and Machine Translation Systems

........................................................................................................................2 The Problem of ASL Generation ..................................................................................3 The Linguistics of American Sign Language ...............................................................3 The Concept of Animated Avatars...............................................................................4 A Language without a Writing System ........................................................................5 Motivations and Applications ......................................................................................6 Brief Introduction to the Systems Under Consideration .............................................6 ViSiCAST Translator ..................................................................................................7 ZARDOZ ....................................................................................................................7 ASL Workbench..........................................................................................................8 TEAM Project .............................................................................................................8 Thematic Critique and Comparison of the Systems ....................................................9 Underlying Machine Translation Architecture ...........................................................10 Coverage, Specificity, and Development Time ..........................................................14 ASL Grammar Formalism and Generation Approach.................................................16 Expressiveness of ASL Representations ....................................................................18 The Animation Output...............................................................................................20 Classifier Predicates and the Use of Three-Dimensional Space ..................................22 Sign Lexicon Specification ........................................................................................24 Degree of User Intervention Needed for Translation ..................................................26 Greatest Strengths of the Four Systems .....................................................................27 ZARDOZ and the Use of Reasoning During Translation ...........................................27 Workbench and the Model of ASL Phonology...........................................................28 ViSiCAST and the Discourse Representation Structures............................................29 TEAM and the EMOTE Motion Parameterization .....................................................30 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................32 New Directions.............................................................................................................33 References....................................................................................................................35