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A User-Powered American Sign Language Dictionary
Conference proceeding

A User-Powered American Sign Language Dictionary

Danielle Bragg, Kyle Rector and Richard Ladner
Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on computer supported cooperative work & social computing, pp.1837-1848
CSCW '15
02/28/2015
DOI: 10.1145/2675133.2675226

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Abstract

Students learning American Sign Language (ASL) have trouble searching for the meaning of unfamiliar signs. ASL signs can be differentiated by a small set of simple features including hand shape, orientation, location, and movement. In a feature-based ASL-to-English dictionary, users search for a sign by providing a query, which is a set of observed features. Because there is natural variability in the way signs are executed, and observations are error-prone, an approach other than exact matching of features is needed. We propose ASL-Search, an ASL-to-English dictionary entirely powered by its users. ASL-Search utilizes Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) on a database of feature-based user queries to account for variability. To demonstrate ASL-Search's viability, we created ASL-Flash, a learning tool that presents online flashcards to ASL students and provides query data. Our simulations on this data serve as a proof of concept, demonstrating that our dictionary's performance improves with use and performs well for users with varied levels of ASL experience.
american sign language (asl) crowdsourcing dictionary education information retrieval (ir) latent semantic analysis (lsa)

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