2 May 2008

Congratulations to Sara Morrissey who successfully defended her thesis and will be awarded the degree of PhD.

The title of Sara's thesis is "Data-Driven Machine Translation for Sign Languages".

She completed her PhD in the National Centre for Language Technology (NCLT), and the School of Computing, DCU under the supervision of Professor Andy Way.

Sara is now working as a post-doctoral researcher with the Centre for Next Generation Localisation (CNGL), at DCU.  In this post Sara will work with Prof. Harold Somers on Machine Translation for Patients with Limited English. She will also continue her sign language work, as well as working with minority spoken languages.

Brief description of Project:

With only ~1% of the Irish non-Deaf population being able to communicate in Irish Sign Language (ISL), most Deaf people not being confident in their English skills, and very few public services available through ISL, Deaf people face communication and comprehension barriers on a daily basis. A lack of interpreter availability coupled with confidentiality issues, as well as the English-language dependency of subtitling and teletype system mean that these services cannot always overcome these barriers. This thesis presents the development of data-driven machine translation (MT) technology using DCU’s MaTrEx MT system to address these communication problems. We have created a bidirectional multi-lingual translation system for sign languages (SLs) in the domain of airport information that includes gesture recognition and animation technology components to translate both to and from SLs.

This project was generously funded by the Irish Research Council for Science, Engineering and Technology (IRCSET) and IBM

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