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Enhanced open content collaborative video annotation Wikipedia for South African sign language
Last modified: 2009-08-26
Abstract
The SASL project at the University of the Western Cape aims at developing a fully automated translation system between English and South African Sign Language (SASL). An integral part of this system is the actual translation between SASL and English which requires an extensive knowledge base on SASL. Unfortunately, such a knowledge base does not currently exist.
The problem therefore exists to acquire information on SASL from users of SASL, however sign language is a complex language. The primary medium that shall be captured is the video, this medium is capable of capturing all the body movements of a SASL speaker.
We are therefore in the process of creating a web-based tool for capturing sign language video in the form of a wiki. Wikipedia are low cost and efficient sources of information and are an appropriate means to collect information about SASL and house it for public use.
The intended use of the system would be for the user to log on to the system, upload a SASL video on to the wiki and subsequently segment the video at key points and insert descriptive information about the relevant
gesture at each of the key points. Once this process has been completed the information about the SASL video can be browsed inside the wiki.
The tool that we are using for the annotation of the videos is OntoLog, which however was not intended for application to SASL video, and does not allow manual annotations. We are, therefore in a process of further enhancing it to allow for this, to be Incorporated into the wiki.
The problem therefore exists to acquire information on SASL from users of SASL, however sign language is a complex language. The primary medium that shall be captured is the video, this medium is capable of capturing all the body movements of a SASL speaker.
We are therefore in the process of creating a web-based tool for capturing sign language video in the form of a wiki. Wikipedia are low cost and efficient sources of information and are an appropriate means to collect information about SASL and house it for public use.
The intended use of the system would be for the user to log on to the system, upload a SASL video on to the wiki and subsequently segment the video at key points and insert descriptive information about the relevant
gesture at each of the key points. Once this process has been completed the information about the SASL video can be browsed inside the wiki.
The tool that we are using for the annotation of the videos is OntoLog, which however was not intended for application to SASL video, and does not allow manual annotations. We are, therefore in a process of further enhancing it to allow for this, to be Incorporated into the wiki.