Framework Programmable Platform for the Advanced Software Development Workstation: Preliminary system design document

The Framework Programmable Software Development Platform (FPP) is a project aimed at combining effective tool and data integration mechanisms with a model of the software development process in an intelligent integrated software environment. Guided by the model, this system development framework will take advantage of an integrated operating environment to automate effectively the management of the software development process so that costly mistakes during the development phase can be eliminated. The focus here is on the design of components that make up the FPP. These components serve as supporting systems for the Integration Mechanism and the Framework Processor and provide the 'glue' that ties the FPP together. Also discussed are the components that allow the platform to operate in a distributed, heterogeneous environment and to manage the development and evolution of software system artifacts

Proposing a speech to gesture translation architecture for Spanish deaf people.

This article describes an architecture for translating speech into Spanish Sign Language (SSL). The architecture proposed is made up of four modules: speech recognizer, semantic analysis, gesture sequence generation and gesture playing. For the speech recognizer and the semantic analysis modules, we use software developed by IBM and CSLR (Center for Spoken Language Research at University of Colorado), respectively. Gesture sequence generation and gesture animation are the modules on which we have focused our main effort. Gesture sequence generation uses semantic concepts (obtained from the semantic analysis) associating them with several SSL gestures. This association is carried out based on a number of generation rules. For gesture animation, we have developed an animated agent (virtual representation of a human person) and a strategy for reducing the effort in gesture animation. This strategy consists of making the system automatically generate all agent positions necessary for the gesture animation. In this process, the system uses a few main agent positions (two or three per second) and some interpolation strategies, both issues previously generated by the service developer (the person who adapts the architecture proposed in this paper to a specific domain). Related to this module, we propose a distance between agent positions and a measure of gesture complexity. This measure can be used to analyze the gesture perception versus its complexity. With the architecture proposed, we are not trying to build a domain independent translator but a system able to translate speech utterances into gesture sequences in a restricted domain: railway, flights or weather information

Determining what people feel and think when interacting with humans and machines

Any interactive software program must interpret the users’ actions and come up with an appropriate response that is intelligable and meaningful to the user. In most situations, the options of the user are determined by the software and hardware and the actions that can be carried out are unambiguous. The machine knows what it should do when the user carries out an action. In most cases, the user knows what he has to do by relying on conventions which he may have learned by having had a look at the instruction manual, having them seen performed by somebody else, or which he learned by modifying a previously learned convention. Some, or most, of the times he just finds out by trial and error. In user-friendly interfaces, the user knows, without having to read extensive manuals, what is expected from him and how he can get the machine to do what he wants. An intelligent interface is so-called, because it does not assume the same kind of programming of the user by the machine, but the machine itself can figure out what the user wants and how he wants it without the user having to take all the trouble of telling it to the machine in the way the machine dictates but being able to do it in his own words. Or perhaps by not using any words at all, as the machine is able to read off the intentions of the user by observing his actions and expressions. Ideally, the machine should be able to determine what the user wants, what he expects, what he hopes will happen, and how he feels

Parametric synthesis of sign language

The isolation of the deaf community from mainstream society is in part due to the lack of knowledge most hearing people have of sign language. To most, there seems to be little need to learn a language that is spoken by such a small minority unless perhaps a relative is unable to hear. Even with a desire to learn, the task may seem insurmountable due to the unique formational and grammatical rules of the language. This linguistic rift has led to the call for an automatic translation system with the ability to take voice or written text as input and produce a comprehensive sequence of signed gestures through computing. This thesis focused on the development of the foundation of a system that would receive English language input and generate a sequence of related signed gestures each synthesized from their basic kinematic parameters. A technique of sign specification for a computer-based translation system was developed through the use of Python objects and functions. Sign definitions, written as Python algorithms, were used to drive the simulation engine of a human-modeling software known as Jack. This research suggests that 3-dimensional computer graphics can be utilized in the production of sign representations that are intelligible and natural in appearance

Toward a Motor Theory of Sign Language Perception

Researches on signed languages still strongly dissociate lin- guistic issues related on phonological and phonetic aspects, and gesture studies for recognition and synthesis purposes. This paper focuses on the imbrication of motion and meaning for the analysis, synthesis and evaluation of sign language gestures. We discuss the relevance and interest of a motor theory of perception in sign language communication. According to this theory, we consider that linguistic knowledge is mapped on sensory-motor processes, and propose a methodology based on the principle of a synthesis-by-analysis approach, guided by an evaluation process that aims to validate some hypothesis and concepts of this theory. Examples from existing studies illustrate the di erent concepts and provide avenues for future work.Comment: 12 pages Partiellement financ\'e par le projet ANR SignCo

The relation between language and theory of mind in development and evolution

Considering the close relation between language and theory of mind in development and their tight connection in social behavior, it is no big leap to claim that the two capacities have been related in evolution as well. But what is the exact relation between them? This paper attempts to clear a path toward an answer. I consider several possible relations between the two faculties, bring conceptual arguments and empirical evidence to bear on them, and end up arguing for a version of co-evolution. To model this co-evolution, we must distinguish between different stages or levels of language and theory of mind, which fueled each other’s evolution in a protracted escalation process

Structuring information through gesture and intonation

Face-to-face communication is multimodal. In unscripted spoken discourse we can observe the interaction of several “semiotic layers”, modalities of information such as syntax, discourse structure, gesture, and intonation. We explore the role of gesture and intonation in structuring and aligning information in spoken discourse through a study of the co-occurrence of pitch accents and gestural apices. Metaphorical spatialization through gesture also plays a role in conveying the contextual relationships between the speaker, the government and other external forces in a naturally-occurring political speech setting

The weight of phonetic substance in the structure of sound inventories

In the research field initiated by Lindblom & Liljencrants in 1972, we illustrate the possibility of giving substance to phonology, predicting the structure of phonological systems with nonphonological principles, be they listener-oriented (perceptual contrast and stability) or speaker-oriented (articulatory contrast and economy). We proposed for vowel systems the Dispersion-Focalisation Theory (Schwartz et al., 1997b). With the DFT, we can predict vowel systems using two competing perceptual constraints weighted with two parameters, respectively λ and α. The first one aims at increasing auditory distances between vowel spectra (dispersion), the second one aims at increasing the perceptual salience of each spectrum through formant proximities (focalisation). We also introduced new variants based on research in physics - namely, phase space (λ,α) and polymorphism of a given phase, or superstructures in phonological organisations (Vallée et al., 1999) which allow us to generate 85.6% of 342 UPSID systems from 3- to 7-vowel qualities. No similar theory for consonants seems to exist yet. Therefore we present in detail a typology of consonants, and then suggest ways to explain plosive vs. fricative and voiceless vs. voiced consonants predominances by i) comparing them with language acquisition data at the babbling stage and looking at the capacity to acquire relatively different linguistic systems in relation with the main degrees of freedom of the articulators; ii) showing that the places “preferred” for each manner are at least partly conditioned by the morphological constraints that facilitate or complicate, make possible or impossible the needed articulatory gestures, e.g. the complexity of the articulatory control for voicing and the aerodynamics of fricatives. A rather strict coordination between the glottis and the oral constriction is needed to produce acceptable voiced fricatives (Mawass et al., 2000). We determine that the region where the combinations of Ag (glottal area) and Ac (constriction area) values results in a balance between the voice and noise components is indeed very narrow. We thus demonstrate that some of the main tendencies in the phonological vowel and consonant structures of the world’s languages can be explained partly by sensorimotor constraints, and argue that actually phonology can take part in a theory of Perception-for-Action-Control