Developing a Statistical Turkish Sign Language Translation System for Primary School Students

Abstract

As the access to information in the education domain increases, new technologies are developing for school children. However, deaf and dumb children still have limited access to the information, especially in their school lives. One of the most important reasons for this problem is the lack of studies in the Sign Language domain. In this paper, we propose a novel method for translation from Turkish to Turkish Sign Language for primary school students using the statistical machine translation approach. To the best of our approach, this is the first work that applies statistical translation to Turkish Sign Language. A parallel corpus is compiled from the books published by Ministry of National Education of Turkey. The results of the system were tested using different evaluation metrics. We observe that the results obtained are motivating for new studies.