Example Based Amharic Text To Ethiopian Sign Language Machine Translation

Ethiopian sign language (EthSL) is an independent language used by the Ethiopian Deafrnsociety. Sign language is a visual gestural language, used by the Deaf for everydayrncommunication. In most societies sign language is not known, and if known, it is not wellrnunderstood even by their own family. This in turn makes their communication to be dependentrnon interpreters even in situations like medical treatment that need privacy.rnMachine translation for spoken languages is a successful area of research and development.rnBut in case of sign language, especially in case of EthSL it is in its infancy. This is becausernSign language research is still a relatively new area when compared to research into spokenrnlanguages.rnIn this study an attempt is made to design and implement an example based Amharic Text tornEthiopian Sign Language Machine Translation system by collecting examples. The examplerndata is processed to produce morphologically analyzed Amharic words, word structures andrnsentence structures in addition to adopting EthSL dictionary. A prototype performingrntranslation based on knowledge acquired from processed example data is thus developed byrninvolving word feature analysis, matching, alignment and recombination phases. The resultingrntranslation output of EthSL sign is displayed as a sequence of video clips.rnThe system is assessed in terms of adequacy and fluency with three groups of evaluators forrndifferent categories of texts. The evaluation result shows that finger spellings, numbers andrnwords from the adopted dictionary were adequately understood with a rank of ‘All meaning’rnand with ‘Good’ fluency whereas words out of the adopted dictionary were adequatelyrnunderstood with a rank of ‘Most meaning’ with ‘Acceptable’ fluency. In case of sentencesrn‘Much meaning’ has been adequately understood with ‘Acceptable’ fluency level.rnThe usability of the prototype was ranked as ‘Excellent’ with a ‘Very good’ level of ease ofrnuse. Deaf members of the test teams have been aspired with the capability of the prototype forrnfuture use and they expressed their willingness to contribute for full deployment of the system.

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