From VLibras to OpenSigns: Towards an Open Platform for Machine Translation of Spoken Languages into Sign Languages

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From VLibras to OpenSigns: Towards an Open Platform for Machine Translation of Spoken Languages into Sign Languages
From VLibras to OpenSigns: Towards an Open Platform for
Machine Translation of Spoken Languages into Sign Languages
Tiago Araújo · Rostand Costa · Manuella Lima · Guido Lemos

June, 2018

1 Introduction                                                    In order to allow adequate access of information
                                                              for deaf people, one solution is to translate/interpret
The World Health Organization estimates that approx-          spoken contents into the associated SL. However, con-
imately 466 million people worldwide have some level          sidering the volume and dynamism of information in
of hearing loss[31]. In Brazil, according to the 2010 cen-    some environments and platforms, such as the Web,
sus of the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statis-       performing this task using human interpreters is a very
tics (IBGE), there are approximately 9.7 million Brazil-      difficult task, considering the high volume of content
ians with some type of hearing loss, representing around      that is published daily on the Internet. In the context
5.1% of its population[13].                                   of Digital TV, the support for sign languages is gener-
    This relevant part of the population faces several        ally limited to a window with a human sign language
challenges for accessing information, since it is gener-      interpreter, which is displayed overlaying the video pro-
ally available in written or spoken language. The main        gram. This solution has high operational costs for gen-
problem is that most deaf people are not proficiency          eration and production of the contents (cameras, stu-
in reading and writing the spoken language of their           dio, staff, among others), needs full-time human inter-
country. One of the possible explanations is the fact         preters, which ends up restricting its use to a small por-
that these languages are based on sounds[25]. A study         tion of the TV programming. To address this question
carried out in 2005 with 7 to 20 years old Dutch deaf         pragmatically, one of the most promising approaches is
persons found that only 25% of them had a reading ca-         the use of machine translation (MT) tools from spoken
pacity equal or greater than a 9-year-old child without       languages into SLs.
disability [30].                                                  Proportionately to the number of SL, there are also
    One of the reasons for this difficulty is that the deaf   several parallel initiatives to develop machine trans-
communicate naturally through sign languages (SL),            lation tools for SLs, usually focused on a single lan-
and spoken languages are just a “second language”.            guage/country[11, 17, 24]. Most of these text-to-sign1 ma-
Each SL is a natural language, with its own lexicon and       chine translation tools, although they were developed
grammar, developed by each deaf community over time,          independently in their respective countries, have sim-
as well as each non-deaf community develop its spoken         ilarities in approach, scope, and architecture. In gen-
languages. Thus, there is no unique SL. Although there        eral, the basic functionalities are present in some form
are some similarities between all these languages, each       in most of them. Some examples are the extraction of
country usually has its own, some even more than one          the text to be translated from audio and subtitles, the
- by 2013, there were already over 137 sign languages         generation of a sign language video, incorporation of
cataloged around the world[4].                                the sign language videos into the original videos (e.g,
                                                              on Digital TV), dactilology and rendering of signs by
                                                              plugins and mobile applications, etc. There are also sim-
Digital Video Applications Lab (LAVID)
Informatics Center (CI) - Federal University of Paraiba         1
                                                                  In this paper, we use the acronym text-to-sign to repre-
(UFPB)                                                        sent the translation of texts from spoken languages into sign
E-mail: {maritan,rostand,manuella,guido}@lavid.ufpb.br        languages.
From VLibras to OpenSigns: Towards an Open Platform for Machine Translation of Spoken Languages into Sign Languages
2                                                                                                     Tiago Araújo et al.

ilarities in the structure and behavior of components,          further enhance digital inclusion and accessibility, in
such as APIs and backends of communication, transla-            technologies such as Digital TV, Web and Cinema, es-
tion and control.                                               pecially in the poorest countries.
     The main points of variation are usually the spe-
cific mechanism of machine translation and the sign lan-
guage dictionary (visual representation of signs). Con-         2 Machine Translation Platforms for Sign
sidering the use of avatars for representing the content        Languages
in the sign language, the process of creating the visual
represention of signs is usually similar (e.g., a set of        2.1 Sign Languages
animations) and generally depends on the allocation of
                                                                The communication of people with hearing impairment
financial and human resources, regardless of the tech-
                                                                occurs through formal gestural languages, called Sign
nology used.
                                                                Languages (SL). SL are languages that use gestures,
     To reduce this problem, the objective of this pa-
                                                                facial and body expressions, instead of sounds in com-
per is to propose an open, comprehensive and extensi-
                                                                munication. They have a proper linguistic system that
ble platform for text-to-sign translation in various us-
                                                                is independent of spoken languages and effectively ful-
age scenarios and countries, including Digital TV. In
                                                                fills the communication needs of the human being, be-
the proposed platform, the common components share
                                                                cause they have the same complexity and expressiveness
generic functionalities, including the creation and ma-
                                                                of the spoken languages [21].
nipulation of the SL dictionaries. Only the translation
                                                                     SLs have properties common to other human lan-
mechanism and the dictionary itself are interchange-
                                                                guages[21], such as:
able, being specific for each SL. To accelerate the de-
velopment, we used the Suı́te VLibras2 tools and com-            – Flexibility and Versatility: SL present several possi-
ponents as a basis[2].                                             bilities of use in different contexts;
     Our proposal is the concentration of efforts and re-        – Arbitrarities: the word is arbitrary because it is al-
sources around an unique solution can provide some                 ways a convention recognized by the speakers - the
cutting edge gains, such as the definition of patterns for         sign languages also have words where there is no
the industry standard and greater functional flexibility           relation between form and meaning;
for the common components, and also allow advances               – Discontinuity: minimal differences between words
in the state-of-the-art, such as sharing techniques and            and their meanings are discontinued through the
heuristics among translation mechanisms.                           distribution they present at different linguistic lev-
     A single standardized platform with centralized pro-          els;
cessing of multiple sign languages can also serve as a           – Creativity/Productivity: there are infinite ways of
catalyst for more advanced translation services, such              expressing the same idea with different rules;
as incorporating text-to-textIn this paper, we use the           – Dual articulation: the human languages present units
acronym text-to-text to represent the translation of texts         of smaller articulations, without meanings, that com-
between spoken or written languages. conversion. Thus,             bined with others form units of meaning;
we can integrate available translation mechanisms be-            – Standard : there is a set of rules shared by a group
tween spoken languages to allow Deaf in Brazil or Spain            of people;
to understand a text in English, for example.                    – Structural Dependency: elements of the language can
     Another contribution is to leverage the emergence             not be combined at random, there is a structural de-
of a common core machine translator that can be ex-                pendence between them.
tended/adapted to other languages and regionalisms.                 Generally, each country has its own sign language.
Reducing the effort to make a new SL available may              The Brazilian Sign Language (Libras), Portuguese Ges-
  2
    The Suite VLIBRAS is the result of a partnership be-        tural Language (LGP), Angolan Sign Language and
tween the Brazilian Ministry of Planning, Development and       Mozambican Sign Language (LMS) are the SL of Brazil,
Management (MP), through the Information Technology Sec-        Portugal, Angola and Mozambique, respectively, just to
retariat (STI) and the Federal University of Paraı́ba (UFPB),
                                                                name a few countries with the same oral linguistic base
and consists of a set of tools (text, audio and video) for
the Brazilian Sign Language (Libras), making computers,         (ie, Portuguese). As in spoken languages, there are also
mobile devices and Web platforms accessible to deaf. Cur-       variations within the sign language itself, caused by re-
rently, VLibras is used in several governmental and private     gionalisms and/or other cultural differences.
sites, among them the main sites of the Brazilian government
                                                                    It is relatively common to assume that sign lan-
(brasil.gov.br), Chamber of Deputies (camara.leg.br) and the
Federal Senate (senado.leg.br) ). Further information can be    guages are flagged versions of their respective spoken
obtained from http://www.vlibras.gov.br.                        languages. However, although there are similarities, SLs
From VLibras to OpenSigns: Towards an Open Platform for Machine Translation of Spoken Languages into Sign Languages
VLibras to OpenSigns                                                                                                    3

are autonomous languages, possessing singularities that    chine translation services for the other components 3
distinguish them from spoken languages and each other      and also hosts the repository of 3D models of the Libras
SL [21].                                                   signs that are used by the avatar to render the acces-
    The relevant cultural differences that impact the      sible content after the translation. Currently, the Signs
modes of environmental representation are reflected in     Dictionary of the Suı́te VLibras has around 13,500
considerable differences between sign languages.           modeled signs, one of the largest bases of the kind in
                                                           the world.
                                                               Finally, there is the WikiLibras, a Web tool for the
                                                           collaborative modeling of signs in Libras, which allows
2.2 Machine Translation Platforms                          volunteers to participate in the process of building and
                                                           expanding the signs dictionary, through the specifica-
Machine translation systems for sign languages are gen-    tion of the movements of each signal.
erally divided into three main classes: Rule-Based Ma-
chine Translation (RBMT), Statistical Machine Trans-
lation (SMT) and Example-Based Machine Translation         3 Open Signs: A Proposal of a Multilingual
(EBMT) [26]. One important challenge of these systems      Machine Translation Platform
is to ensure that the content available to deaf has the
same consistency and quality of the original content,      From our experience in the development of the Suı́te
allowing the adequate understanding of the message.        VLibras, we identified that a number of VLibras fea-
    Considering these systems may be a viable alterna-     tures were not dependent of the source and the tar-
tive to minimize the marginalization of deaf, especially   get language, and possibly applicable to other contexts.
through digital inclusion, several researches have been    Among the technological tools potentially reusable, we
developed around the world focusing on the develop-        can mention:
ment and offering of operational platforms for MT from      – Plug-ins for three browsers (Google Chrome, Mozilla
spoken languages into SL.                                     Firefox and Safari) that allow texts on web pages to
    With respect to machine translation for Brazilian         be captured, submitted to a remote text-to-gloss4
Sign Language, there are four platforms available for         translator and the resulting glosses are rendered by
machine translation of Brazilian Portuguese digital con-      an avatar.
tents into LIBRAS: Suı́te VLibras [1, 2], HandTalk[6],      – TV applications for the Brazilian Digital TV Sys-
ProDeaf [20] e Rybená[22].                                   tem that allow the presentation of sign language
    The Suı́te VLibras is a set of open source com-           contents available on Digital TV signal.
putational tools that translates digital content from       – Mobile applications for two platforms (Android
Brazilian Portuguese (BP) into Libras, making the in-         and iOS) that allow the translation and rendering of
formation available for deaf users on computers, TVs,         signs from an input text, also using a remote text-
mobile devices and Internet portals. An overview of its       to-gloss translator.
component architecture is given by Figure 1.                – Desktop applications for two operating systems
    The VLibras main components are:                          (Windows and Linux) that allow contents from mul-
                                                              tiple sources on the user’s computer to be translated
– VLibras-Plugin: a browser extension that allows the         to SL and rendered offline.
  translation of selected texts to LIBRAS;                  – Extraction mechanisms of texts from audio and
– VLibras-Mobile: VLibras clients for mobile devices          videos for a text-to-gloss translation .
  ( both iOS and Android);                                  – A web portal for video translation resulting in a
– VLibras-Desktop: is a tool used to translate into sign      new video with a sign language window synchro-
  language marked texts taken from applications run-          nized with the original audio.
  ning on personal computers;
– VLibras-Video: is a portal that allows translation to        An integrated set of tools like this for machine trans-
  LIBRAS of audio tracks or subtitles associated with      lation using avatars is not easy to develop and we be-
  videos;                                                  lieve there are few initiatives in the world with this
                                                             3
– LibrasTV : an adaption of VLibras for the Brazilian          Except for the VLibras-Desktop, which operates au-
  Digital TV system.                                       tonomously and offline, having a built-in machine translator
                                                           and a copy of the Signs Dictionary.
                                                             4
                                                               We use the acronym text-to-gloss to represent the transla-
    It is also part of the Suı́te VLibras a backend        tion of texts in spoken languages into a textual representation
service called VLibras-Service, which performs the ma-     in sign language, called gloss.
From VLibras to OpenSigns: Towards an Open Platform for Machine Translation of Spoken Languages into Sign Languages
4                                                                                                    Tiago Araújo et al.

Fig. 1 Suı́te VLibras Component Architecture

reach and penetration, and still making available a dic-      port for multiple source and target languages. We called
tionary composed of more than 13,500 Brazilian Sign           it OpenSigns-Core.
Language (Libras) 3D signs.                                       According to Figure 4, the components highlighted
    Based on these resources, our proposal is to offer a      in orange and red represent the points of variance and
multilingual platform for machine translation text-to-        have been rebuilt to support multiple source and target
sign, which accepts several spoken languages as input         languages. The components in blue had their basic be-
and performs a machine translation into several target        havior maintained. The minor adjustments required are
sign languages. With the effort of generalization prac-       related to the generalization and internationalization of
ticed in this work, the VLibras framework could become        their interface. We will detail these changes in Sections
available to be extended and used in other countries and      3.1.1 and 3.1.2.
languages.
    Thus, the main focus of our work was the transfor-        3.1.1 Multilingual Text-to-Gloss Translator
mation of a complete platform of machine translation
from Brazilian Portuguese (written or spoken) to LI-          Originally, the basic role of the Suite VLibras MT
BRAS, called VLibras, into an extensible and multilin-        component was to receive texts in BP and convert them
gual machine translation platform, called OpenSigns.          to a textual representation in Libras, called gloss. Since
                                                              most of the related work uses a rules-based translation
                                                              approach, including VLibras, we choose this translation
3.1 Building an OpenSigns Platform Prototype                  approach for the OpenSigns MT component. The main
                                                              reason for making this choice is the difficulty in finding
We started with an initial assessment that the majority       a large and representative bilingual corpus of several
of the Suı́te VLibras components has generic features         domains for all spoken language-sign language pairs. In
that can be shared among several sign languages with          addition, SLs are visuospatial languages which means
minor changes. The main changes needed are aimed              that the gloss representation is intermediate. Therefore,
at making the components that access the translation          there is no formal, structured and widely disseminated
services “agnostic”, ie, independent of the source and        written form, which hinders the establishment of natu-
taget languages. In addition, we also focus on enabling       ral conventions of writing a natural language and makes
the solution to support multiple machine translation          it difficult to implement a statistical or a neural MT
engines and multiple sign dictionaries.                       component, for example.
    Figure 3 illustrates the architecture of the VLibras-         However, it is possible to use other MT approaches.
Core[2]. Initially, it only translated content from Brazil-   Since this component has a restricted and well-defined
ian Portuguese (BP) to Libras. Figure 4 presents an           function (ie translating a text from a spoken language
adapted version of this architecture, which includes sup-     into a gloss of sign language), it could be replaced by
VLibras to OpenSigns                                                                                                  5

                          (a)                                                     (b)

                         (c)                                                      (d)

Fig. 2 VLibras Aplications (a) VLibras Desktop, (b) VLibras Plugin, (c) VLibras Mobile and (d) VLibras Video

other MT component (e.g., a neural MT implementa-                As can be seen in Figure 4, one novelty of the Open-
tion, a statistical MT implementation, among others)         Signs architecture is the incorporation of a previous
with little or no modification to the overall architecture   text-to-text conversion. In this new context, the text-
of the system.                                               to-gloss translation process now consists of two dis-
    The four main steps of the VLibras translation pro-      tinct integrated processes: (1) a text-to-text machine
cess are as follows (see Figure 5)[15]:                      translation, which converts the input text into a spo-
                                                             ken language associated with the target sign language
 – Preprocessing: In this step, the input text is sepa-
                                                             (eg, from English to Brazilian Portuguese); and (2) a
   rated in sentences and then in tokens.
                                                             specific text-to-gloss translation to the target sign lan-
 – Classification: Two classification approaches are per-
                                                             guage (eg, from Portuguese to Libras gloss). The in-
   formed: Morphological, where we identify the gram-
                                                             ternal organization of the components of the generic
   matical classes of the tokens in the sentence; Syn-
                                                             text-to-gloss translator of OpenSigns is illustrated in
   tactic, which groups lexical items into multiple syn-
                                                             Figure 6.
   tactical units.
 – Morphological and Syntactic Adequacy: This process            It is important to note that the text-to-gloss transla-
   is important because the Libras structure is gener-       tion of OpenSigns has a machine translation algorithm
   ally different from the Brazilian Portuguese. In addi-    similar to that used in the VLibras, containing the four
   tion, Libras has some morphological elements that         original steps (see Figure 5). However, the architectural
   are not represented, such as articles and preposi-        pattern of the translator has been changed to allow
   tions. It is also necessary to treat verbal tense, to     the development of several concrete implementations,
   identify common nouns of two genera, among oth-           so that the singularities of each sign language can be
   ers.                                                      addressed punctually, with maximum reuse.
 – Postprocessing: This step refines the sequence of             The configuration of the concrete components used
   glosses to improve the quality of the translation.        in the text-to-gloss machine translation for each pair
   Some examples are: treatment of numbers, plural,          of languages  sup-
   synonyms, among others.                                   ported is defined previously by a template and applied
6                                                                                                 Tiago Araújo et al.

Fig. 3 Internal Architecture of VLibras-Core

Fig. 4 Internal Architecture Adapted to the OpenSigns

by the OpenSigns translator at run time. This flexibility       In some steps, whose behavior is usually based on
allows the implementation of specific steps that can be     external configurations such as models and translation
addressed for a specific sign language, whereas others      rules, we can reference a generic concrete implementa-
can be shared by several sign languages. For example,       tion in template and make adjustments just in the con-
the preprocessing and post-processing steps, which per-     figurations. As shown in Figure 7, this strategy allows
form common actions can be referenced in more than          to conciliate several different scenarios for the morpho-
one template, whereas the specific morphological and        logical adequacy step, allowing that existing sign lan-
syntactic classifications can be inherited and adapted,     guage implementations can be adapted and integrated
or fully reimplemented.                                     to the OpenSigns, and new implementations can be cre-
VLibras to OpenSigns                                                                                                    7

Fig. 5 Internal Organization of the Suite VLibras Translator

Fig. 6 Internal Organization of the OpenSigns Translator

                                                                     The process of build the animations (or videos) of
                                                                 the signs is usually one of the major challenges in the
                                                                 development of a MT platform for sign languages. Gen-
                                                                 erally, each sign needs to be interpreted by a human
                                                                 interpreter, digitally captured, adapted to the model of
                                                                 an avatar, revised, and finally encapsulated in a par-
                                                                 ticular pattern of representation. This process is very
Fig. 7 Implementation of the Morphological Adequacy Step         expensive and time-consuming, because the creation of
                                                                 a correct and extensive signs dictionary with tens of
ated using generic classifiers and adapters offered by the       thousands of signs involves many technological and lo-
platform.                                                        gistical resources and also the coordinated effort of a
                                                                 multidisciplinary team.

3.1.2 Multilingual Signs Repository                                  To assist in this process, the Suı́te VLibras already
                                                                 provides a specific environment for building and man-
Regardless of the translation approach used in the text-         aging its Libras dictionary, called WikiLibras[2]. Wik-
to-gloss MT, the quality of the text-to-sign translation         iLibras aims to facilitate the implementation of some
generally also depends on the available sign vocabu-             of the above steps, performed by teams (volunteer or
lary [14]. In this type of machine translator, the signing       not) and also to allow the distributed management of
is usually done using 3D avatars, that use these signs           the workflow of animation, revision and distribution of
to render the message. In the absence of a sign, the             the signs.
avatar’s default behavior is to make the fingerspelling
(or dactylology5 ), which makes it difficult to under-               A schematic view of WikiLibras is presented in Fig-
stand, and requires more time for signing.                       ure 8. It offers a graphical interfaces for sign editing,
 5
                                                                 which simplify some of the animation tasks, reducing
    Fingerspelling (or dactylology) is the communication in
                                                                 the level of expertise required for the animators. In
sign language of a word or other expression by rendering its
written form letter by letter in a manual alphabet (definition   addition, it also allows the abstraction of the sign de-
extracted from www.dictionary.com)                               scription language used internally by the components of
8                                                                                                        Tiago Araújo et al.

Suı́te VLibras. The same features applies to the process             All rules, whether morphological or syntactic, are
of defining the formal translation rules.                        modeled in XML files. Basically, each rule contains in-
    Some parts of the WikiLibras features are sign lan-          formation from which grammar class it is intended for
guage agnostics, i.e. they are not exclusive to Libras           and the action should be taken whether the rule applies
and can be applied for creating signs in other SL. How-          to the sentence. The application of syntactic rules im-
ever, we have to perform some changes to the tool for            plies the updating of the syntactic tree in order to keep
using in the OpenSigns. These changes are highlighted            it consistent with the modifications made.
in orange in Figure 9 and focus essentially on making                The adaptations made from BP to Libras also use
the repository multilingual, from the point of view of           auxiliary dictionaries and algorithms for treatments of
storage as well as to reference signs that belongs to            special plurals. In the morphological adaptations to En-
multiple dictionaries.                                           glish, auxiliary dictionaries are also used for the veri-
                                                                 fication of some specific, as well as exclusive modules
                                                                 for verbal treatment and treatment of plurals, in both
                                                                 cases using algorithms based on WordNet7 . In this first
3.2 Proof of Concept                                             version of the prototype, in the translation from En-
                                                                 glish to ASL and Spanish to LSE, only morphological
To develop a proof of concept of the proposal platform,
                                                                 adequacy is being done.
initially, we developed a prototype able to translate
                                                                     The post-processing step implemented in the Open-
texts into several source spoken languages into three
                                                                 Signs prototype refines the translation in a specific way
target SLs: Libras, LSE and ASL.
                                                                 for each of the three SL. Some examples of steps per-
    The text-to-text pre-translation module was devel-           formed in this step are: substitution of words or part
oped using the Google Cloud Translation API6 , to con-           of the sentence by a synonym, the substitution of num-
vert texts in any spoken language into Brazilian Por-            bers by numerals and identification of compound words,
tuguese, Spanish or English depending on the target              among others.
sign language.
    Then, the text-to-gloss translation module was adapted
to support the translation of sentences in Brazilian Por-        4 Final Remarks
tuguese (BP), English or Spanish for a sequence of
glosses into Libras, ASL or LSE respectively. The tok-           In this work, we present the results of a research whose
enization (i.e., the separation of words from each sen-          objective is the development of a multilingual platform
tence) in English or Spanish language was made specif-           for “text-to-sign” machine translation, ie, a unique ecosys-
ically for each of them, taking into account their own           tem that accepts several spoken languages as input and
structural characteristics.                                      performs a machine translation for several output sign
    We also adapted the process of generation of sen-            languages. The proposed platform is based on several
tence syntax trees for English and Spanish in the new            common existing components, derivated from the Suı́te
translation componnents. Figure 10 bring one example             VLibras, in which components supporting specific mech-
of syntactic trees for the same sentence in BP, English          anisms of different sign languages have been added.
and Spanish, respectively.                                           A prototype, based on an extension of Suı́te VLi-
    Thus, before the generation of the syntactic tree,           bras was developed with the aim of verify that the
the proper labels of English and Spanish are replaced            basic concepts of the proposed platform are feasible. In
by their grammatical equivalents in BP, if any. Such             this prototype, additional components have been im-
a temporary artifice used in the prototype may have              plemented to support the translation of texts in any
some impacts on the generation of the syntactic tree             language for LIBRAS.
of some sentences but does not make the translation                  The OpenSigns MT component implemented in our
process unfeasible.                                              prototype is rule-based, since the most of the related
    The text-to-gloss translation is based on a set of           work uses a rules-based translation approach, including
grammatical rules specific to each language treated in           VLibras, and due to the difficulty in finding a large
the prototype. Such rules are aimed at the adequacy of           and representative bilingual corpus of several domains
the morphosyntactic divergences between the spoken               for all spoken language-sign language pairs. However,
language and the associated target sign language.                since this component has a restricted and well-defined
                                                                 function (ie translating a text from a spoken language
  6                                                              into a gloss of sign language), we could replace it by
    This API is able to identify the input language of a sen-
tence and translate it automatically into a target spoken lan-
                                                                  7
guage (cloud.google.com/translate).                                   wordnet.princeton.edu/citing-wordnet
VLibras to OpenSigns                                                                                                  9

Fig. 8 WikiLibras Architecture

Fig. 9 WikiSigns Architecture

                                                              perform some tests to assess whether our proposed text-
                                                              to-sign MT approach can be extended to support other
                                                              target SL (e.g., ASL). These tests show that our exten-
                                                              sion MT approach for ASL had also WER and BLEU
                                                              values better than a direct translation approach.
                                                                  We believe it is fundamental to stimulate the com-
Fig. 10 Example of a Sentence Syntactic Tree in BP, English
                                                              munity of researchers and developers who work with
and Spanish
                                                              MT for sign language to collaborate. As we are distinct
                                                              groups, the cooperation is only possible with the def-
a neural or statistical MT component with little or no        inition of standards for architecture and some system
modification to the overall architecture of the system.       components. One of the components that is critical for
    In Section 4, we present some tests carried out with      the evolution of the results in the area is the SL dictio-
the implemented prototype addressing the two research         nary. For us, the dictionary must be a resource shared
questions presented in Section 1. These tests show that       by the different MT systems. This would imply in a
is possible to combine a text-to-text MT approach along       more accelerated increase in the number of signs, qual-
with a text-to-sign translation in order to provide sup-      ity and convergence in the use of signs. It is therefore
port translation from several spoken languages. How-          vital to accelerate the definition and expansion of the
ever, as expected, the translation of a spoken language       sign languages themselves.
into a sign language from another country (e.g., from             This strategy was performed by Suite Vlibras au-
English to Libras) tends to produce worse results than a      thors and follow the same strategy in the research de-
translation performed from an spoken language to the          scribed in this article with the aim of encouraging and
sign language of the same country (e.g., from BP to           strengthening cooperation and accelerate the ordered
Libras), but better than a direct translation. We also        growth of the dictionaries of signs.
10                                                                                                           Tiago Araújo et al.

    As future and complementary work, a deeper in-                15. Lima MACB, Araújo TMU, Oliveira ES (2015). Incorpo-
vestigation with deaf users of other countries will be              ration of Syntactic-Semantic Aspects in a LIBRAS Machine
                                                                    Translation Service to Multimedia Platforms. Proceedings
done to reinforce these results. Thus, the major goal of
                                                                    of the 21st Brazilian Symposium on Multimedia and the
this work is the dissemination of the OpenSigns project.            Web, Webmedia 2015, 133-140.
Such disclosure is critical because full validation de-           16. López-Ludeña V, González-Morcillo C, López JC, Fer-
pends on researchers, interpreters, and users from other            reiro E, Ferreiros J, San-Segundo R (2014a) Methodology
                                                                    for developing an advanced communications system for the
countries using the platform.                                       Deaf in a new domain. Knowledge-Based Systems. 52:240-
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