Towards Automatic Translation from Japanese into Japanese Sign Language

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In this paper, we present a prototype MT system named SYUWAN which can translate Japanese into Japanese sign language. One of the most important problems in this translation is that there are very few entries in a sign language dictionary, compared with Japanese one. To solve this problem, when the original input word does not exist in a sign language dictionary, SYUWAN applies some 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 95 percent of words which are morphologically analyzed.