Zina Kamal


2020

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Towards Kurdish Text to Sign Translation
Zina Kamal | Hossein Hassani
Proceedings of the LREC2020 9th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Sign Language Resources in the Service of the Language Community, Technological Challenges and Application Perspectives

The resources and technologies for Sign language processing of resourceful languages are emerging, while the low-resource languages are falling behind. Kurdish is a multi-dialect language, and it is considered a low-resource language. It is spoken by approximately 30 million people in several countries, which denotes that it has a large community with hearing-impairments as well. This paper reports on a project which aims to develop the necessary data and tools to process the Sign language for Sorani as one of the spoken Kurdish dialects. We present the results of developing a dataset in HamNoSys and its corresponding SiGML form for the Kurdish Sign lexicon. We use this dataset to implement a sign-supported Kurdish tool to check the accuracy of the Sign lexicon. We tested the tool by presenting it to hearing-impaired individuals. The experiment showed that 100% of the translated letters were understandable by a hearing-impaired person. The percentages were 65% for isolated words, and approximately 30% for the words in sentences. The data is publicly available at https://github.com/KurdishBLARK/KurdishSignLanguage for non-commercial use under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 licence