Cross modal comprehension in ZARDOZ an English to sign-language translation system

The sign languages used by deaf communities around the world represent a linguistic challenge that natural language researchers have only recently begun to take up. Zardoz is a system which tackles the cross-modal machine-translation problem, translating speech and text into animated sign language. Native sign languages, such as ISL (Ireland), BSL (Britain) and ASL (U.S.A.) have evolved in deaf communities as natural methods of gestural communication. These languages differ from English, not only in modality, but in grammatical structure, exploiting the dimensions of space as well as time. This paper presents an architectural overview of Zardoz, and describes the methods employed to analyse the verbal input and generate the corresponding signed output.