Modeling French Sign Language: a proposal for a semantically compositional system.

The recognition of French Sign Language (LSF) as a natural language in 2005 created an important need for the development of tools to make information accessible to the deaf public. With this prospect, the goal of this article is to propose a linguistic approach aimed at modeling the French sign language. We first present the models proposed in computer science to formalize the sign language (SL). We also show the difficulty of applying the grammars originally designed for spoken languages to model SL. In a second step, we propose an approach allowing to take into account the linguistic properties of the SL while respecting the constraints of a modelisation process. By studying the links between semantic functions and their observed forms in Corpus, we have identified several production rules that govern the functioning of the LSF. We finally present the rule functioning as a system capable of modeling an entire utterance in French sign language.