John McDonald


2015

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Synthesizing the finger alphabet of Swiss German Sign Language and evaluating the comprehensibility of the resulting animations
Sarah Ebling | Rosalee Wolfe | Jerry Schnepp | Souad Baowidan | John McDonald | Robyn Moncrief | Sandra Sidler-Miserez | Katja Tissi
Proceedings of SLPAT 2015: 6th Workshop on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies

2014

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Expanding n-gram analytics in ELAN and a case study for sign synthesis
Rosalee Wolfe | John McDonald | Larwan Berke | Marie Stumbo
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)

Corpus analysis is a powerful tool for signed language synthesis. A new extension to ELAN offers expanded n-gram analysis tools including improved search capabilities and an extensive library of statistical measures of association for n-grams. Uncovering and exploring coarticulatory timing effects via corpus analysis requires n-gram analysis to discover the most frequently occurring bigrams. This paper presents an overview of the new tools and a case study in American Sign Language synthesis that exploits these capabilities for computing more natural timing in generated sentences. The new extension provides a time-saving convenience for language researchers using ELAN.