Re:The race to teach sign language to computers
by sohkamyung on Tuesday March 09, 2021 @06:27AM
(#26397794)
This paragraph from the article highlights some of the problems.
> Research led by a team at Microsoft, a big computing firm, and published in 2019, estimated that a typical publicly available corpus of a spoken language consists of around a billion words from as many as 1,000 different speakers. An equivalent data-set in a sign language might have fewer than 100,000 signs from just ten people. Besides large numbers, a good corpus also needs variety. This means conversations between native signers of diverse backgrounds, dialects and levels of fluency. Because deaf people more often have physical disabilities than do those with unaffected hearing, representing those with restricted fluency of movement is important.
> Research led by a team at Microsoft, a big computing firm, and published in 2019, estimated that a typical publicly available corpus of a spoken language consists of around a billion words from as many as 1,000 different speakers. An equivalent data-set in a sign language might have fewer than 100,000 signs from just ten people. Besides large numbers, a good corpus also needs variety. This means conversations between native signers of diverse backgrounds, dialects and levels of fluency. Because deaf people more often have physical disabilities than do those with unaffected hearing, representing those with restricted fluency of movement is important.