• Journal of KIISE
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• v.44 no.2
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• pp.163-170
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• 2017

Despite the rise of studies in spoken to sign language translation, low-resource problems of sign language corpus have been rarely addressed. As a first step towards translating from spoken to sign language, we addressed the problems arising from resource scarcity when translating spoken language to manual signals translation using statistical machine translation techniques. More specifically, we proposed three preprocessing methods: 1) paraphrase generation, which increases the size of the corpora, 2) lemmatization, which increases the frequency of each word in the corpora and the translatability of new input words in spoken language, and 3) elimination of function words that are not glossed into manual signals, which match the corresponding constituents of the bilingual sentence pairs. In our experiments, we used different types of English-American sign language parallel corpora. The experimental results showed that the system with each method and the combination of the methods improved the quality of manual signals translation, regardless of the type of the corpora.