A MACHINE TRANSLATION SYSTEM FOR CONVERTING TAMIL TEXT TO SIGN LANGUAGE

D.Narashiman1,Dr.T.Mala2
1

dnarashiman@gmail.com

ABSTRACT
The system developed uses a novel approach to translate the given Tamil text into sign language. The system proposed here is cross-modal. It gives a wider interaction of textual input and generates corresponding gestural output in one or a number of sign variants. The application receives Tamil text sentences as input and provide output in 3D animated sequence. This is used as a non-human translator for many private and confidential situations like, discussion between doctor/hearing impaired patient or lawyer/ hearing impaired client. It is an effective learning tool for the relatives of the deaf community and other people who are interested in learning sign language. The animated output, enables the user to visualize the signs effectively and the animation is useful for number of envisaged purposes such as TV newscasts, automation, translation system for the deaf. This paper talks about the developed interactive system which translates tamil text to sign language by compiling sign language video, mapping of word and sign language, generation of sign language and animated output. The entire process is done in two phases learning phase and testing phase. The direct knowledge repository and incremental knowledge repository are created in the learning phase. The direct knowledge repository is created by storing the words and corresponding signs manually. The incremental knowledge repository is created by finger spelled, spatial and rule based methods. The finger spelled method is mainly used to sign noun words( ). The spatial methods are used to denote adjective words like . The rule based method is used to sign ambiguous words like During testing phase the system takes the Tamil text input. The input text is first divided into tokens, then these tokens are divided into nouns, verbs, predicates etc ( , , , ) using ATCHARAM-Tamil morphological analyzer. These subdivided groups are stored in database tables according to their classifications. The tokens that are stored in the tables are compared and mapped with the signs which are already in the direct knowledge repository database and incremental knowledge repository. The words and corresponding signs are stored in a particular database finally these signs are arranged in the logical sequences and output is generated. The main challenge of the system is mapping the sign, generating the new sign if not ` available in the database and rearranging the symbols according to the meaning of the text checking the grammar of the sentence, adding to the database for future reference. Future development in this system is to increase the sign symbols for the words that are commonly used in day to day life and also generalizing the symbols irrespective of native speakers, to customize the output image according to their interest. The data set could be extended to include more information and help to improve translations.