Athanasia-Lida Dimou

Institute for Language and Speech Processing Athena RC

Background Until now there is a lack of cognitive screening tests for Deaf older adults to detect Alzheimer’s Disease Dementia (ADD) across Europe, as well as limited access to the therapeutic methods imposed. Therefore, the Deaf population has little access to dementia services. Method To fill this gap, the current Erasmus+ project aims to adapt...

The interlingual index links sign language resources with a multilingual wordnet, connecting languages at the level of semantic concepts. This final project release of the index covers both the core sign languages of the project as well as two additional languages. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY This report describes the EASIER deliverable of an interlingual in...

A wordnet for a number of sign languages targeted in the Easier project.

In this paper we present a web-based data collection method designed to elicit narrative discourse from adults with and without language impairments, both in an in-person set up and remotely. We describe the design, methodological considerations and technical requirements regarding the application development, the elicitation tasks, materials and g...

In this paper, we introduce a neural rendering pipeline for transferring the facial expressions, head pose and body movements of one person in a source video to another in a target video. We apply our method to the challenging case of Sign Language videos: given a source video of a sign language user, we can faithfully transfer the performed manual...

The direct involvement of deaf users in the development and evaluation of signing avatars is imperative to achieve legibility and raise trust among synthetic signing technology consumers. A paradigm of constructive cooperation between researchers and the deaf community is the EASIER project1, where user driven design and technology development have...

Although signing avatar technology seems to be the only option currently available to serve sign language (SL) display in the context of applications which demand generative capacity from the part of the technology like in machine translation to SL, signing avatars have not yet been accepted by signers' communities. One major factor for this reject...

This paper reports on the restructuring of a bilingual (Greek Sign Language, GSL – Modern Greek) lexicographic database with the use of the WordNet semantic and lexical database. The relevant research was carried out by the Institute for Language and Speech Processing (ILSP) / Athena R.C. team within the framework of the European project Easier. Th...

Wordnets have been a popular lexical resource type for many years. Their sense-based representation of lexical items and numerous relation structures have been used for a variety of computational and linguistic applications. The inclusion of different wordnets into multilingual wordnet networks has further extended their use into the realm of cross...

Aphasia is a common speech and language disorder, typically caused by a brain injury or a stroke, that affects millions of people worldwide. Detecting and assessing Aphasia in patients is a difficult, time-consuming process, and numerous attempts to automate it have been made, the most successful using machine learning models trained on aphasic spe...

Greek Sign Language (GSL) was recognized as an official language in 2000 [1], but was not until 2017 [2] that it finally gained equal status with Modern Greek (MG). Considering the above facts, it is not surprising that available electronic resources in GSL are far from abundant. Even scarcer are original resources that have been generated by the d...

In this paper, we touch upon the requirement for accessibility via Sign Language as regards dynamic composition and exchange of new content in the context of natural language-based human interaction, and also the accessibility of web services and electronic content in written text by deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals. In this framework, one key...

Here we present the POLYTROPON parallel corpus for the language pair Greek Sign Language (GSL) – Modern Greek, which is created and annotated aiming to serve as a golden corpus available to the community of SL technologies for experimentation with various approaches to SL processing, focusing on machine learning for SL recognition, machine translat...

In this paper, we touch upon the requirement for accessibility via Sign Language as regards dynamic composition and exchange of new content in the context of natural language based human interaction, and also accessibility of web services and electronic content in written text by deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals. In this framework, one key issu...

Accessibility of electronic content by deaf and hard-of-hearing WWW users is crucially depending on the possibility to acquire information that can be presented in their native sign language (SL), from the vast amounts of text sources being constantly uploaded. Similarly crucial is the ability to easily create new electronic content that can enable...

The MOBOT project has envisioned the development of cognitive robotic assistant prototypes that act proactively, adaptively and interactively with respect to elderly humans with slight walking and cognitive difficulties. To meet the project's goals, a multimodal action recognition system is being developed to monitor, analyse and predict user actio...

Acquisition and annotation of a multimodal-multisensory data set of human-passive rollator-carer interactions have enabled the analysis of related human behavioural patterns and the definition of the MOBOT human-robot communication model. The MOBOT project has envisioned the development of cognitive robotic assistant prototypes that act proactively...

This paper reports on work related to the modelling of Human-Robot Communication on the basis of multimodal and multisensory human behaviour analysis. A primary focus in this framework of analysis is the definition of semantics of human actions, i.e. verbal and non-verbal signals, in a specific context with distinct Human-Robot interaction states....

This paper proposes the implementation of a post-processing stage to a grammar-based machine translation (MT) system from written into sign language for the pair written Greek–Greek sign language (GSL), where translation output is visualized by an avatar. Post-processing is applied on the output of the MT system’s transfer module by activating an e...

Previous work in the framework of the MOBOT European project has led to acquisition of a multimodal sensory corpus that is intended to become the primary source of data retrieval, data analysis and testing of the mobility assistive robot prototypes currently under development within the project. The rich and multi-layered annotation of this corpus...

We report on the procedures followed in order to acquire a multimodal sensory corpus that will become the primary source of data retrieval, data analysis and testing of mobility assistive robot prototypes in the European project MOBOT. Analysis of the same corpus with respect to all sensorial data will lead to the definition of the multimodal inter...

The paper discusses the potential of exploitation of sign language (SL) monolingual or multilingual resources in combination with lately developed Web technologies in order to answer the need for creation of SL educational content. The reported use case comprises tools and methodologies for creating educational content for the teaching of Greek Sig...

This paper presents the multilingual corpus of four European sign languages compiled in the framework of the Dicta-Sign project. Dicta-Sign researched ways to enable communication between Deaf individuals through the development of human-computer interfaces (HCI) for Deaf users, by means of sign language. Sign language resources were compiled to in...

The aim of the present work is to discuss a limited set of issues which concern the grammar modelling of Greek Sign Language (GSL) within the framework of improving the naturalness and more specifically the grammaticality of synthetic GSL signing. This preliminary study addresses the linguistic issues relating to specific grammar structures and the...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether native Greek adults can identify their mother tongue from synthesized stimuli which contain only prosodic - melodic and rhythmic - information. More specifically we are trying to investigate whether Greek native speakers are able to discriminate their mother dialect form another one, also from Gre...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether the identification of one's idiom is feasible through only prosodic information. As an experimental approach of this theory, we attempt to study whether native Greek adults can identify their mother idiom from synthesized stimuli which contain only prosodic - melodic and rhythmic - information. In...

The present paper investigates the relationship that may exist between songs (sung speech) and (read) speech. It is part of a wider project aiming at assessing harmony between song and speech as far as duration, pitch and intensity are concerned. This preliminary study actually centers on duration only. Three Greek speaking participants were asked...