Theodore Goulas


2024

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The EASIER Mobile Application and Avatar End-User Evaluation Methodology
Frankie Picron | Davy Van Landuyt | Rehana Omardeen | Eleni Efthimiou | Rosalee Wolfe | Stavroula-Evita Fotinea | Theodore Goulas | Christian Tismer | Maria Kopf | Thomas Hanke
Proceedings of the LREC-COLING 2024 11th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Evaluation of Sign Language Resources

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Signs and Synonymity: Continuing Development of the Multilingual Sign Language Wordnet
Marc Schulder | Sam Bigeard | Maria Kopf | Thomas Hanke | Anna Kuder | Joanna Wójcicka | Johanna Mesch | Thomas Björkstrand | Anna Vacalopoulou | Kyriaki Vasilaki | Theodore Goulas | Stavroula-Evita Fotinea | Eleni Efthimiou
Proceedings of the LREC-COLING 2024 11th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Evaluation of Sign Language Resources

2022

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Signing Avatar Performance Evaluation within EASIER Project
Athanasia-Lida Dimou | Vassilis Papavassiliou | John McDonald | Theodore Goulas | Kyriaki Vasilaki | Anna Vacalopoulou | Stavroula-Evita Fotinea | Eleni Efthimiou | Rosalee Wolfe
Proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Sign Language Translation and Avatar Technology: The Junction of the Visual and the Textual: Challenges and Perspectives

The direct involvement of deaf users in the development and evaluation of signing avatars is imperative to achieve legibility and raise trust among synthetic signing technology consumers. A paradigm of constructive cooperation between researchers and the deaf community is the EASIER project , where user driven design and technology development have already started producing results. One major goal of the project is the direct involvement of sign language (SL) users at every stage of development of the project’s signing avatar. As developers wished to consider every parameter of SL articulation including affect and prosody in developing the EASIER SL representation engine, it was necessary to develop a steady communication channel with a wide public of SL users who may act as evaluators and can provide guidance throughout research steps, both during the project’s end-user evaluation cycles and beyond. To this end, we have developed a questionnaire-based methodology, which enables researchers to reach signers of different SL communities on-line and collect their guidance and preferences on all aspects of SL avatar animation that are under study. In this paper, we report on the methodology behind the application of the EASIER evaluation framework for end-user guidance in signing avatar development as it is planned to address signers of four SLs -Greek Sign Language (GSL), French Sign Language (LSF), German Sign Language (DGS) and Swiss German Sign Language (DSGS)- during the first project evaluation cycle. We also briefly report on some interesting findings from the pilot implementation of the questionnaire with content from the Greek Sign Language (GSL).

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Greek Sign Language Recognition for the SL-ReDu Learning Platform
Katerina Papadimitriou | Gerasimos Potamianos | Galini Sapountzaki | Theodore Goulas | Eleni Efthimiou | Stavroula-Evita Fotinea | Petros Maragos
Proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Sign Language Translation and Avatar Technology: The Junction of the Visual and the Textual: Challenges and Perspectives

There has been increasing interest lately in developing education tools for sign language (SL) learning that enable self-assessment and objective evaluation of learners’ SL productions, assisting both students and their instructors. Crucially, such tools require the automatic recognition of SL videos, while operating in a signer-independent fashion and under realistic recording conditions. Here, we present an early version of a Greek Sign Language (GSL) recognizer that satisfies the above requirements, and integrate it within the SL-ReDu learning platform that constitutes a first in GSL with recognition functionality. We develop the recognition module incorporating state-of-the-art deep-learning based visual detection, feature extraction, and classification, designing it to accommodate a medium-size vocabulary of isolated signs and continuously fingerspelled letter sequences. We train the module on a specifically recorded GSL corpus of multiple signers by a web-cam in non-studio conditions, and conduct both multi-signer and signer-independent recognition experiments, reporting high accuracies. Finally, we let student users evaluate the learning platform during GSL production exercises, reporting very satisfactory objective and subjective assessments based on recognition performance and collected questionnaires, respectively.

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Introducing Sign Languages to a Multilingual Wordnet: Bootstrapping Corpora and Lexical Resources of Greek Sign Language and German Sign Language
Sam Bigeard | Marc Schulder | Maria Kopf | Thomas Hanke | Kyriaki Vasilaki | Anna Vacalopoulou | Theodore Goulas | Athanasia-Lida Dimou | Stavroula-Evita Fotinea | Eleni Efthimiou
Proceedings of the LREC2022 10th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Multilingual Sign Language Resources

Wordnets have been a popular lexical resource type for many years. Their sense-based representation of lexical items and numerous relation structures have been used for a variety of computational and linguistic applications. The inclusion of different wordnets into multilingual wordnet networks has further extended their use into the realm of cross-lingual research. Wordnets have been released for many spoken languages. Research has also been carried out into the creation of wordnets for several sign languages, but none have yet resulted in publicly available datasets. This article presents our own efforts towards an inclusion of sign languages in a multilingual wordnet, starting with Greek Sign Language (GSL) and German Sign Language (DGS). Based on differences in available language resources between GSL and DGS, we trial two workflows with different coverage priorities. We also explore how synergies between both workflows can be leveraged and how future work on additional sign languages could profit from building on existing sign language wordnet data. The results of our work are made publicly available.

2016

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Multimodal Resources for Human-Robot Communication Modelling
Stavroula–Evita Fotinea | Eleni Efthimiou | Maria Koutsombogera | Athanasia-Lida Dimou | Theodore Goulas | Kyriaki Vasilaki
Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)

This paper reports on work related to the modelling of Human-Robot Communication on the basis of multimodal and multisensory human behaviour analysis. A primary focus in this framework of analysis is the definition of semantics of human actions in interaction, their capture and their representation in terms of behavioural patterns that, in turn, feed a multimodal human-robot communication system. Semantic analysis encompasses both oral and sign languages, as well as both verbal and non-verbal communicative signals to achieve an effective, natural interaction between elderly users with slight walking and cognitive inability and an assistive robotic platform.