English to Indian Sign Language Gloss Conversion Using a Rule-Based Approach

Indian Sign Language (ISL) is the most widely used language by the deaf community in India. ISL has its own grammatical structure and syntactic rules. It varies significantly from other regional or spoken languages. This paper presents a system for converting English text to ISL gloss structure, which could be considered as a low-resource machine translation task. A constituency parse tree-based approach is followed for performing the grammatical transformation of sentences. The transformed sentences are then converted to ISL gloss structure, based on ISL grammar rules. The proposed system could be used as the primary component of English to ISL video generation systems and also for supporting bilingual education of the Deaf.