ASL, Learn Sign Language Fast

Archive for May, 2010

It’s not only humans that can learn from watching television. Software developed in the UK has worked out the basics of sign language by absorbing TV shows that are both subtitled and signed.

While almost all shows are broadcast with subtitles, some are also accompanied with sign language because it is easier for many deaf people to follow.

Shows with both text and signing are a bit like a Rosetta Stone – a carving that provided the breakthrough in decoding Egyptian hieroglyphics from an adjacent translation in classical Greek.

So Patrick Buehler and Andrew Zisserman at the University of Oxford, along with Mark Everingham at the University of Leeds set out to see if software that can already interpret the typed word could learn British Sign Language from video footage.

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