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Universal Access in the Information Society
Published in: Universal Access in the Information Society 4/2019

15-06-2018 | Long Paper

Automatic translation of Arabic text-to-Arabic sign language

Authors: Hamzah Luqman, Sabri A. Mahmoud

Published in: Universal Access in the Information Society | Issue 4/2019

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Abstract

Arabic sign language (ArSL) is a full natural language that is used by the deaf in Arab countries to communicate in their community. Unfamiliarity with this language increases the isolation of deaf people from society. This language has a different structure, word order, and lexicon than Arabic. The translation between ArSL and Arabic is a complete machine translation challenge, because the two languages have different structures and grammars. In this work, we propose a rule-based machine translation system to translate Arabic text into ArSL. The proposed system performs a morphological, syntactic, and semantic analysis on an Arabic sentence to translate it into a sentence with the grammar and structure of ArSL. To transcribe ArSL, we propose a gloss system that can be used to represent ArSL. In addition, we develop a parallel corpus in the health domain, which consists of 600 sentences, and will be freely available for researchers. We evaluate our translation system on this corpus and find that our translation system provides an accurate translation for more than 80% of the translated sentences.
previous article Middle-aged adults’ attitudes toward health app usage: a comparison with the cognitive-affective-conative model

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Footnotes
2
Habash-Soudi-Buckwalter transliteration system [31].
 
3
We will explain the bracketing (glossing) system in Sect. 5.
 
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Metadata
Title
Automatic translation of Arabic text-to-Arabic sign language
Authors
Hamzah Luqman
Sabri A. Mahmoud
Publication date
15-06-2018
Publisher
Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Published in
Universal Access in the Information Society / Issue 4/2019
Print ISSN: 1615-5289
Electronic ISSN: 1615-5297
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10209-018-0622-8

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