Bilingual Sign Language Dictionary to Support People with Hearing Disabilities

At the ICCHP conference held during July 12-14 2006 at University of Linz, Austria, José L. Fuertes and Ángel L. González, faculty of computer science, and Gonzalo Mariscal and Carlos Ruiz, CETTICO, faculty of computer science from UPM’s Montegancedo campus at Madrid, Spain, presented their paper on a Bilingual Sign Language Dictionary.

The paper discussed the significance of developing the bilingual (sign language and spoken language) Spanish Sign Language Dictionary (DILSE) for Spanish-speaking people with a hearing impairment. This assistive technology is designed for imparting proper information and training to people with a hearing disability, enabling them to better integrate into the society. DILSE also enables people to learn and improve their knowledge of Spanish Sign Language (LSE).

The team carried out research at different levels to achieve the two objectives. First, signs in the dictionary were identified and classified by cataloging and searching for them according to their properties. Second, a study was carried out on how to develop software to create the dictionary so that it will search for signs on the basis of graphical features.

Weighing the pros and cons of all popular dictionaries such as ASL, Auslan, British, “Signos 97-98,” “Mis Primeros Signos” and others,  DILSE’s assistive technology solution derived four principle points to function as a bilingual LSE dictionary for Spanish-speaking people with a hearing impairment. One, the dictionaries are not full-fledged ones as they usually pertain to educational courses. Two, they are not as mature as lexicons developed for other languages and have limited two-way searching. Three, sign languages should be geographically diverse. And finally, teams of developers outside the hearing impaired communities should be provided with the tools to add new signs or modify existing ones.

The team worked at compiling signs with geographical varieties and doing away with redundancies. Leading Spanish dictionaries and second language teaching/learning material were examined and an initial selection of vocabulary was made. Further, associations of hearing-impaired users were contacted and asked to compile signs that they were using to permit translation of newly formed vocabularies. Commonly used terms were classified as “national.”

As a next step to developing the assistive technology product, the selected signs were given descriptions, like active and passive hand shapes, use of both hands, body contact and hand movement. The dictionary entailed a software system for it to become user-friendly and is open to expansion and additional functionalities, as needed. This involved creating frameworks and search algorithms.

DILSE currently supports two search types: Searching by Spanish and Searching by Sign. Moreover, it provides morphological information on signs (any inflection a sign goes through in terms of its context)

DILSE, one of the first ever bilingual dictionaries for people with hearing disabilities, has content that can be accessed from the description of LSE signs. Users can, in fact, access graphical features of signs. Developed on the basis of COREUS platform, DILSE has extended itself to DILSE dictionary of neologisms and DILSE basic dictionary.