Improving accessibility for deaf people: an editor for computer assisted translation through virtual avatars.

Abstract

This paper presents the ATLAS Editor for Assisted Translation (ALEAT), a novel tool for the Computer Assisted Translation (CAT) from Italian written language to Italian Sign Language (LIS) of Deaf People. The tool is a web application that has been developed within the ATLAS project, that targets the automatic translation from Italian written language to Italian Sign Language in the weather forecasts domain. ALEAT takes a text as input, written according to the Italian Language grammar, performs the automatic translation of the sentence and gives the result of the translation to the user by visualizing it through a virtual character. Since the automatic translation is error-prone, ALEAT allows to correct it with the intervention of the user. The translation is stored in a database resorting to a novel formalism: the ATLAS Written Extended LIS (AEWLIS). AEWLIS allows to play the translation through the ATLAS visualization module and to load it within ALEAT for successive modifications and improvement.