Researchers synthesized Spanish sign language through a virtual assistant

Julietta Research Group at the University of Sevilla (Spain) is developing a technology based on an avatar or virtual representation summarizing the Spanish sign language within a virtual assistant with capacity for dialogue with stakeholders.

Professor of English and principal investigator of the project José Gabriel Amores said that "government, in its policies of accessibility, have the commitment to avoid all the obstacles that will arise for all those people with some type of disability, in this case , hearing, submitted to them in their life, "the institution said in a press release.

The project, called 'Avidea: Virtual Assistant for Hearing Impaired Persons', has the support of Intelligent Dialogue Systems (Indisys), a spin-off of the University of Seville.

As initial pilot tests, the virtual assistant will include, through Indisys, page Andalusian Employment Service (SAE), and the idea is that the virtual assistant has the ability to express themselves through sign language. The user with some kind of hearing impairment that you want information about jobs, you would type your query and get your answer so text and sign language.

The project, which was recently launched, covering various fields of research necessary to get the prototype of virtual assistant: linguistics, machine translation, sign language, natural language processing, nonverbal communication and software development.

José Gabriel Amores explained that "the peculiarity is that sign language is not universal, so it is not trivial, and from the point of view requires considerable computing power, since it must get real-time synchronization and the generation of all the sequence of signs of a message. "

To convert the text, which has to reproduce in sign language, techniques used in machine translation, where the group has had previous experience. Likewise, the group has previously participated in several European projects in dialog management, including the project include Talk.

Talk is a multilingual project management and multimodal spoken dialogue that makes it easier for people with physical, mobility, control of home devices using a virtual butler. Turning the light or view the status of household appliances, among other functions, are made through spoken language instructions through menus on a touch screen or through a combination of spoken and tactile modalities.

Source: europapress
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