Signing Avatars - Multimodal Challenges for Text-to-sign Generation

This paper is a positional paper that surveys existing technologies for animating signing avatars from written language. The main grammatical mechanisms of sign languages are described, and in particular the sign inflecting mechanisms in light of the processes of spatialization and iconicity that characterize these visual-gestural languages. The challenges faced by sign language generation systems using signing avatars are then outlined, as well as unresolved issues in building text-to-sign generation systems.