A rule triggering system for automatic text-to-sign translation

The topic of this paper is machine translation (MT) from French text into French sign language (LSF). After arguing in favour of a rule-based method, it presents the architecture of an original MT system, built on two distinct efforts: formalising LSF production rules and triggering them with text processing. The former is made without any concern for text or translation and involves corpus analysis to link LSF form features to linguistic functions. It produces a set of production rules which may constitute a full LSF production grammar. The latter is an information extraction task from text, broken down in as many subtasks as there are rules in the grammar. After discussing this architecture, comparing it to the traditional methods and presenting the methodology for each task, the paper present the set of production rules found to govern event precedence and duration in LSF and gives a progress report on the implementation of the rule triggering system. With this proposal, it is also hoped to show how MT can benefit today from sign language processing.