Generating Italian from Italian Sign Language glosses with GENLIS

Abstract

The present work focuses on the automatic generation of a written text in Italian language starting from glosses of a fable in Italian Sign Language (LIS). After a detailed overview on LIS and Natural Language Generation, the reader is introduced to our experiment on generation and to the machine that made it possible, i.e. the GENLIS generator. We decided to generate text from a LIS version of the fable “The Tortoise and the Hare”, which was annotated manually. In order to achieve our goal, we converted glosses into Prolog strings to be fed to the generator. In this thesis, we present the generation mechanism, which is based on a set of algorithms that allow the generator to work properly. Furthermore, I compare the generated output with our target translation of the fable and identify some of its flaws. Finally, I specify the main problems encountered in the generation process. This analysis led us also to demonstrate that LIS is a true, complex language with specific characteristics and not some sort of gestural system with no linguistic status.