Project: On-line NZ Sign Language Dictionary
NZ Sign Language is the language of the Deaf community in New Zealand. Like other Sign Languages around the world, it is a full language with its own vocabulary and grammatical structure - it isn't a signed version of English and it isn't just a collection of gestures. Like other Sign Languages, it is not a written language, partly because it is hard to write down a language in which the words and sentences involve simultaneous movements of parts of the body in three dimensions. Another reason is that it is only in the past two decades that NZ Sign Language has been recognised as a real, natural, human language.
NZ Sign Language is distinct from other sign languages used in other countries around the world, though it is closely related to AusLan (Australian Sign Language) and is descended from British Sign Language.
The university (Deaf Studies Research Unit in the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies) and the Deaf Association of NZ produced a dictionary of NZ Sign Language. In some ways, the dictionary is an ordinary bilingual dictionary - translating between English words and NZSL signs. However, because NZSL is not a written language, the dictionary has some interesting features:
- The NZSL entries involve images - drawings of each sign.
- The ordering of signs has to be based on properties of the sign, not on an alphabetic ordering.
- The English to NZSL section is a little awkward to use - the images take too much space to be able to repeat them in both the NZSL to English and the English to NZSL sections, so the English to NZSL section is really an index with page references back to entries in the NZSL to English section.
- The need for images means that the physical book is large.
I currently have a prototype electronic version of the dictionary, implemented in html and javascript that could be run standalone with a browser and a CD (no server required) or run over the web. It is just a prototype, and has many limitations.
Converting the NZSL dictionary database
The Deaf Studies Research Unit currently has all the data for the dictionary stored in a 4D database. 4D is no longer the appropriate tool for storing the data, and we would like to convert it to a full strength database (eg, postgres). The database should support- data retrieval for research
- online update of the data by the DSRU (including video clips that the DSRU plans to collect)
- web interface for lookup (if we are able to obtain permission to make the data available on the web).
Building a better CD/online NZSL dictionary
The current prototype is written in html and javascript. It would be awkward to deliver on a CD, and has some undesirable limitations. Designing and developing a more substantial and more reliable version would be a very good applied project in the Software Engineering/HCI area. A critical requirement is that it should be available online from a web server and also standalone on a CD.The current prototype has no facility for searching by sign (unlike the paper dictionary). The new version should have additional indexes that allow searching by sign (hand shape, initial position, and possibly some kind of movement specification), at least as much as the paper dictionary.
The current prototype allows the user to construct a "vocabulary page" - a collection of signs and their English translations - that can be saved and printed out (eg for a handout for a NZSL class). The current javascript mechanism for this is very clumsy and unsatisfactory. This needs to be redesigned.
The prototype dictionary uses the (beautifully drawn) images from the printed dictionary; it would be nice to extend it to include video clips as these become available.
Animated interface for searching by Sign
Currently, the prototype allows the user to search for the NZSL sign for an English word either by typing the word or by browsing an alphabetic index. I would like to to extend the search facilities to include searching by properties of the sign (you saw a sign and want to find out the English word for it).In 2003, a Shuyi Scott constructed a prototype interface of the first part of such a search facility. This interface allows a user to enter the most salient parts of the movement in a sign by manipulating a human figure on the screen, and then constructing a description of the motion. The prototype needs to be extended in a number of ways to become potentially useful.
- We discovered that the quality of the animated figure is more important than we originally thought, so the next version will need a better animated figure, with more detailed hands, and more human-like movement.
- The prototype did not include a search mechanism for matching the description of a movement to the HamNoSys encoding of the signs in the dictionary to find the set of matching signs. This is not a trivial lookup since it will require smart partial matching.
- The set of movements permitted by the prototype is too limited, and will need to be extended to handle a reasonable subset of the dictionary signs.
There are a number of Sign Language dictionaries available on-line. Some of them are very impressive; some are very simple. Here is a new Flemish Sign Language Dictionary, which has a facility to look up by sign. The project proposed above could do better than some of them.
My personal interest
I have a copy of the (physical) dictionary, and used it in 2000 while taking taking DEAF102 and DEAF103. Some of the features discussed above are based on what I think would have been useful to me, and what I think might be useful to a tutor.
EResearch
