EASIER (Intelligent Automatic Sign Language Translation), kicking off in January 2021 and lasting three years, aims to create a framework for barrier-free communication among deaf and hearing citizens across Europe by enabling users of European sign languages to use their preferred language to interact with hearing individuals.
EASIER will provide translation between spoken languages and sign languages, both in near-realtime (automatic) and non-realtime (human-in-the-loop) mode. EASIER leverages expertise from the areas of machine translation, computer vision, computer graphics as well as sign language linguistics and language resources. The project’s major target groups are the deaf community, sign language interpreters, and the sign language content creation industry. The consortium brings together the European Union of the Deaf with research groups in sign language technologies as well as experts in the technological sciences and
humanities. A key principle of EASIER is the involvement of deaf personnel in the entire research cycle. Last but not least, EASIER will pursue affect-and gender-informed language technologies.
The ACG’s role in EASIER is to provide the technological tools to perform emotion regulation sentiment analysis on video streams. Within that context, extended annotation strategies are created to transport affective information from speaking to deaf users, and vice-versa, during the automated translation phase. Here, the research challenge is the identification of the differences and similarities, between spoken and signed languages, in the manifestation of emotions and emotion regulatory strategies.
For more details and news, please visit the EASIER project web page.