Toward the creation of an Arab Gloss for arabic Sign Language annotation

Abstract

Arabic sign languages still lack exhaustive scientific studies of their grammatical structure, morpho-syntactic rules, as well as the rules that govern the construction of sentences in these languages. Such studies are necessary for the development and evolution of any language (spoken or sign language). In addition, the lack of tools that help researchers and all those interested in studying Arab sign languages is another obstacle. Among these tools, we highline the importance of the availability of a language for representing Sign Language (SL) in a written form. In this context, we present a new initiative toward the creation of an Arab Gloss writing system for Arab sign languages based on gloss annotation system like American Sign Language. This new transcription system can be useful for learning, teaching or studying as well as developing Sign Language Processing tool like machine translation or building n-gram models.