Abstract
Arabic sign language (ArSL) is a full natural language that is used by the deaf in Arab countries to communicate in their community. Unfamiliarity with this language increases the isolation of deaf people from society. This language has a different structure, word order, and lexicon than Arabic. The translation between ArSL and Arabic is a complete machine translation challenge, because the two languages have different structures and grammars. In this work, we propose a rule-based machine translation system to translate Arabic text into ArSL. The proposed system performs a morphological, syntactic, and semantic analysis on an Arabic sentence to translate it into a sentence with the grammar and structure of ArSL. To transcribe ArSL, we propose a gloss system that can be used to represent ArSL. In addition, we develop a parallel corpus in the health domain, which consists of 600 sentences, and will be freely available for researchers. We evaluate our translation system on this corpus and find that our translation system provides an accurate translation for more than 80% of the translated sentences.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 939-951 |
| Number of pages | 13 |
| Journal | Universal Access in the Information Society |
| Volume | 18 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 1 Nov 2019 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2018, Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.
Keywords
- Arabic gloss system
- Arabic sign language
- Arabic sign language corpus
- Machine translation
- Rule-based machine translation
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Software
- Information Systems
- Human-Computer Interaction
- Computer Networks and Communications