German Sign Language and
Communication of the Deaf
Photo: UHH/Denstorf
7 July 2022, by Pamela Sundhausen
Photo: IDGS
On June 29th the IDGS hosted the fifth international guest lecture this semester with an on-site presentation by Michael Filhol. Gathering in the university’s main building, we watched Michael discuss his current research on transforming signs into a written format.
Together with his team, Michael is developing the writing system AZee, which allows writing down signed constructions as semantic functions. At the moments he is researching how sign language users draw diagrams to prepare for a signed presentation. So far, they have uncovered systematic form-meaning correspondences such as drawing a heart for kindness or an equal sign as in A=B, where B is information about topic A. Using these regular correspondences, Michael and his team are expanding AZee with new rules and graphical symbols.
Michael Filhol is a researcher at LISN (Le Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire des Sciences du Numérique), which forms part of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). His research interests include natural language processing (especially of signed languages), automatic translation of and into signed languages, as well as the graphical representation of signed languages and sign avatars.