Abstract
Sign language is an important path for us to communicate with hearing impaired people. Therefore, learners has been increasing in recent years. There are several researches into learning aid systems and electronic dictionaries for sign language. Especially, when users want to look up the Japanese word labels corresponding with manual motion properties, most of previous retrieval methods are necessary to set various and many retrieval conditions in detail. There is a serious problem that it is hard for beginners to look up the most appropriate sign by the setting wrong conditions. To overcome this problem, this paper proposes a method which uses a different approach from the previous methods. The point of the method is based on the similarity between manual motion descriptions (MMDs) appeared in ordinary sign dictionaries. By computing the similarity between an inputted MMD as a query and the MMDs in the database, retrieval results are outputted in similarity order. The retrieval results formed by the similarity can be considered as a set of signs that are similar to each other. As an interesting point, a subject of sign retrieval can be considered as the document retrieval. The results of evaluation experiments show the applicability and usability of the proposed method. We also discuss a problem that there are ambiguous MMDs by demonstrating examples.
