John J O’Flaherty


2021


Early-stage development of the SignON application and open framework – challenges and opportunities
Dimitar Shterionov | John J O’Flaherty | Edward Keane | Connor O’Reilly | Marcello Paolo Scipioni | Marco Giovanelli | Matteo Villa
Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XVIII: Users and Providers Track

SignON is an EU Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation project, that is developing a smartphone application and an open framework to facilitate translation between different European sign, spoken and text languages. The framework will incorporate state of the art sign language recognition and presentation, speech processing technologies and, in its core, multi-modal, cross-language machine translation. The framework, dedicated to the computationally heavy tasks and distributed on the cloud powers the application – a lightweight app running on a standard mobile device. The application and framework are being researched, designed and developed through a co-creation user-centric approach with the European deaf and hard of hearing communities. In this session, the speakers will detail their progress, challenges and lessons learned in the early-stage development of the application and framework. They will also present their Agile DevOps approach and the next steps in the evolution of the SignON project.