Glossing of American Sign Language (ASL)

Abstract

American Sign Language (ASL) is a sign language used in America with slight modifications across different regions. Over the years it has developed and included a lot of new signs in it. In order for the deaf community to take notes and communicate with common people, ASL glossing is done which is an organized sentence structure of ASL. The goal of this research is to make a rule-based engine that can convert English sentences into ASL Gloss. The research included three phases. Firstly, we collected the English to ASL sentences from different resources including books, websites, etc. Secondly, we made rule-based engine to standardize the format of glossing. Since there are no proper set of rules written till now for ASL, we extracted common rules from sentences collected from different sources and continued our research on the basis of that. Thirdly, the engine was checked using different English sentences. We were able to achieve a BLEU score of 20.85 on the test set.