Synthesizing the finger alphabet of swiss german sign language and evaluating the comprehensibility of the resulting animations

Abstract

This paper reports on work in synthesizing the finger alphabet of Swiss German Sign Language (Deutschschweizerische Gebärdensprache, DSGS) as a first step towards a fingerspelling learning tool for this language. Sign language synthesis is an instance of automatic sign language processing, which in turn forms part of natural language processing (NLP). The contribution of this paper is twofold: Firstly, the process of creating a set of hand postures and transitions for the DSGS finger alphabet is explained, and secondly, the results of a study assessing the comprehensibility of the resulting animations are reported. The comprehension rate of the signing avatar was highly satisfactory at 90.06%.