A Japanese Gloss-based Written Notation for Japanese Sign Language

Abstract

In this paper we propose a notation system for Japanese Sign Language (JSL).This notation system is aimed to help modularize the Japanese-JSL machine translation process and to bring the JSL generation problem closer to that of traditional oral languages.Accordingly, the main concern of this notation is not detailed motions of signs themselves but linguistic structures (i.e., lexical and grammatical information) expressed through such motions.JSL sentences in our notation include signs, compounds of signs, punctuation marks, and non-manual syntactic markers.A sign is represented by the sign identifier (a Japanese word or phrase) and its inflection parameters. JSL sentences are transcribed in the text format with JIS characters.This makes existing text tools available for reading, writing and processing JSL sentences. We conducted a transcribing experiment to evaluate our notation system with 720 JSL sentences performed by native JSL signers, and found that 51 JSL expressions in the 49 sentences could not be sufficiently transcribed.We classify and investigate those expressions.