Railway Stations Announcement System for Deaf (2020)

Abstract: People belonging to hearing-impaired community feels very uncomfortable while travelling or visiting at Railway Stations without the help of human interpreter. Hearing-impaired people are not able to hear any announcements made at Railway Stations like which train heading to which destination. They remain ignorant about the choosing of platform number or counter number without the help of interpreter. Even they cannot find whether train is on time, delayed or cancelled. The Railway Stations Announcement System for Deaf is a rule-based MT developed. It is the first system developed in the domain of public places to translate all the announcements used at Railway Stations into Indian Sign Language (ISL) synthetic animations. The system is developed using Python and Flask Framework. This Machine Translation system accepts announcements in the form of English text as input and produces Indian Sign Language (ISL) synthetic animations as output.

## introduction hearing-impaired people use sign language that is regarded as one of the 136 different language families from around 7105 known living languages of the world to convey their feelings and messages @xcite . different region of the world have different 136 sign languages worldwide. nearly 72 million of the nearly 7 billion people on earth are hearingimpaired. only around 4.3 million sign language users are available from 72 million people. the rest of almost 67 million hearing-impaired people does not use any sign language for communication purpose. so almost 90% of the hearing-impaired people have very limited or no access to education and other information @xcite . hearing-impaired people use sign language involving different hand forms, fingers positions, face expressions, hand gestures and other body postures @xcite . it is a visualspatial language, as the signer often describes an event using the 3d space around his body @xcite . as sign languages lack well-defined structure or grammar rules rendering signs less acceptable to outer world of hearing-impaired community. until the 1960s, sign languages were not taken as bona fide languages but merely grouping or collections of gestures and mime. dr. stokoe's american sign language research was a great boast to render sign language a full-fledged language with its own grammar rules, syntactic and other linguistic rules/attributes. there are some other contributions to prove the same for other sign languages including the indian sign language @xcite . ## literature review the ingit @xcite system built for limited domain of railway reservation translates hindi strings entered as input by reservation clerk to indian sign language (isl) in gloss string that is then converted using hamnosys to animated human avatar. the ingit system works in four modules. isl generator module applies the isl grammar rules to get the isl tagged string. then each word of the isl tagged string is replaced with corresponding hamnosys notation, which are animated using avatars after the conversion into sigml tags. ingit is based on hybrid formulaic grammar approach that uses fluid construction grammar (fcg). this project is validated only on a very small corpus of 230 utterances. a ## result and discussions the overall accuracy of railway stations announcement system for deaf system is found to be approximately 83%. in case of simple announcements, the output accuracy is tested to be 82% and above whereas in case of complex and compound announcements the accuracy is found to be 84%. the system performance can be improved by incorporating word sense disambiguation of more ambiguous words. we have also consulted with isl interpreters and various isl experts by showing them the results and the response received was very encouraging and motivating. in various deaf schools, the overall translation accuracy was validated by demonstrating the system. ## conclusion and future scope a railway stations announcement system for deaf has been presented in this paper. the developed system is the first real-domain announcements translation system for indian sign language. our focus was to develop a system that can translate all the necessary information for travelling or visiting at public places into indian sign language (isl). our system is able to translate all the announcements used at railway stations into indian sign language (isl) synthetic animations so that hearing impaired people can visit railway stations without any problem. in our system, threedimensional animated avatars are used because pre-recorded video footage requires large amount of memory space for storage. animated avatars are easy to upload and download, that's why their processing is fast as compared to recorded video footage and images. in the future, the bilingual isl dictionary can be enhanced with adding more words to it. in addition, the developed system can be extended into other public places.