WikiLIBRAS: Collaborative Construction of a Multimedia Dictionary for Brazilian Sign Language
Danilo Assis Nobre, Mateus Ferreira, Tiago Maritan Ugulino de Araújo, Iris Regina Nascimento, Pollyane Carvalho, Guido Lemos de Souza Filho · Brazilian Symposium on Multimedia and the Web · 2011
Sign Languages (SL) are natural languages composed by their own grammar and vocabulary. Therefore, the different deaf communities need dictionaries to associate the signs to the words of the spoken language of their country. These dictionaries can be used, for instance, to support the teaching and dissemination of these languages, to compose automatic translation systems, etc. However, these SL have, in general, thousand of signals and new ones may appear constantly to express new concepts. As a result, the construction of these dictionaries is resource intensive and is not a trivial task. In order to minimize these problems, this paper proposes a web system to collaborative construction of a multimedia dictionary for Brazilian Sign Language (LIBRAS). The objective is that users, mainly deaf, automatically generate the signs of this dictionary by setting parameters of an animated 3D virtual agent (3D-avatar). A supervision step is applied after the generation of the signs by the users, preventing incorrect signs to be inserted in the dictionary. To enable the automatic generation of these signs, an additional contribution of this work is the definition of a formal language to represent the signs in LIBRAS.