Towards automatic translation from Japanese into Japanese sign language.

In this paper, we present a prototype translation system named SYUWAN which translates Japanese into Japanese sign language. One of the most important problems in this task is that there are very few entries in a sign language dictionary compared with a Japanese one. To solve this problem, when the original input word does not exist in a sign language dictionary SYUWAN applies several techniques to find a similar word from a Japanese dictionary and substitutes this word for the original word. As the result, SYUWAN can translate up to 82% of words which are morphologically analyzed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]