Rosalee WolfeDePaul University · School of Computing
Rosalee Wolfe
PhD / Computer Science
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106
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Introduction
Skills and Expertise
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January 1995 - December 2001
Publications
Publications (106)
Here we report on the methodological approach adopted for the end-user evaluation studies carried out during the lifecycle of the EASIER project, focusing on the project's mobile app and avatar technologies. Evaluation was led by deaf consortium partners and performed in two cycles, involving both deaf signers and hearing sign language (SL) experts...
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...
The Special Thematic Session on Language Accessibility for the Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing focuses on two separate groups of individuals – the hard-of-hearing and the deaf. Both groups have faced barriers to language access, but they have different perspectives and priorities. Those who are hard-of-hearing still use a spoken language as their preferre...
Given the achievements in automatically translating text from one language to another, one would expect to see similar advancements in translating between signed and spoken languages. However, progress in this effort has lagged in comparison. Typically, machine translation consists of processing text from one language to produce text in another. Be...
Researchers have been developing avatars to portray sign languages as a necessary component of automatic translation systems between signed and spoken languages. Although sign language avatar technology has improved significantly in recent years, there are still open questions as to how best portray the linguistic and paralinguistic information tha...
Special issue: Sign language translation and avatar technology
Members of Deaf communities around the world face significant barriers to education, employment, and health care. They need efficient, affordable translation in order to gain access to services that in the hearing world are taken for granted. For this reason, automatic translation betw...
Fingerspelling receptive skills remain among the most difficult aspects of sign language for hearing people to learn due to the lack of access to practice tools that reproduce the natural motion of human signing. This problem has been exacerbated in recent years by the move from desktop to mobile technologies which has rendered prior software platf...
According to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), localization is "the adaptation of a product, application or document content to meet the language, cultural and other requirements of a specific target market" (Ishida & Miller, 2015). One aspect of localizing a sign language avatar is creating a capability to produce convincing mouthing. For purpo...
Creating legible animations of sign language that satisfy the needs of native users requires drawing from the fields of computational linguistics, computer animation and user experience research. This paper explores the problem of layering the many linguistic processes that contribute to a sign language utterance in avatar animation. A new framewor...
This paper reports on work in animating Swiss German Sign Language (DSGS) fingerspelling sequences and signs as well as on the results of a study evaluating the acceptance of the animations. The animated fingerspelling sequences form part of a fingerspelling learning tool for DSGS, while the animated signs are to be used in a study exploring the po...
Animating sign language requires both a model of the structure of the target language and a computer animation system capable of producing the resulting avatar motion. On the language modelling side, AZee proposes a methodology and formal description mechanism to build grammars of Sign languages. It has mostly assumed the existence of an avatar cap...
Fingerspelling recognition is one of the last skills acquired, due to the complex nature of fingerspelling and a lack of display technology that is sufficiently natural for recognition practice. This paper describes a corpus-based study utilizing an n-gram extension to ELAN to gain a deeper understanding of deletion and coarticulation in fingerspel...
This paper reports on work in animating Swiss German Sign Language (DSGS) fingerspelling sequences and signs as well as on the results of a study evaluating the acceptance of the animations. The animated fingerspelling sequences form part of a fingerspelling learning tool for DSGS, while the animated signs are to be used in a study exploring the po...
Researchers have been investigating the potential rewards of utilizing motion capture for linguistic analysis, but have encountered challenges when processing it. A significant problem is the nature of the data: along with the signal produced by the signer, it also contains noise. The first part of this paper is an exposition on the origins of nois...
This work addresses the theoretical issue of computational modeling for signed language avatars.
Computer-generated avatars that portray signed language have the potential to improve Deaf/hearing
communication through their application to Deaf education, interpreter training and automatic
translation. However, current signed language generation sys...
The proliferation of video and audio media on the Internet has created a distinct disadvantage for deaf Internet users. Despite technological and legislative milestones in recent decades in making television and movies more accessible, there has been less progress with online access. A major obstacle to providing captions for Internet media is the...
This paper reports on work in synthesizing the finger alphabet of Swiss German Sign Language (Deutschschweizerische Gebardensprache, DSGS) asafirst step towards afingerspelling learning tool for this language. Sign language synthesis is an instance of automatic sign language processing, which in turn forms part of natural language processing (NLP)....
Fingerspelling is a manual system used by many signers for producing letters of a written alphabet to spell words from a spoken language. It can function as a link between signed and spoken languages. Fingerspelling is a vital skill for ASL/English interpreters, parents and teachers of deaf children as well as providers of deaf social services. Unf...
Generating sentences from a library of signs implemented through a sparse set of key frames derived from the segmental structure of a phonetic model of ASL has the advantage of flexibility and efficiency, but lacks the lifelike detail of motion capture. These difficulties are compounded when faced with real-time generation and display. This paper d...
Over the past two decades, researchers have made great strides in developing avatars for use in Deaf education (Efthimiou & Fotinea, 2007), automatic translation (Elliott, Glauert, Kennaway, & Marshall, 2000), (Filhol, 2012) interpreter training (Jamrozik, Davidson, McDonald, & Wolfe, 2010), validation of transcription (Hanke, 2010), and improving...
Fingerspelling is a critical communication of sign language used not only by deaf children but also by parents, teachers and interpreters who support them. The recognition of fingerspelling is particularly difficult for sign language learners and support software for practice is particularly limited due to the fluid and natural way that signers wil...
Although avatars can portray legible sign language from phonemic tags alone (Wolfe, Cook, McDonald, & Schnepp, 2011), producing believable, natural motion requires the model to also compute a number of sub-phonetic movements that are not included in linguistic annotation. These include subtleties in individual joint timings which, while not part of...
Although avatars can portray legible sign language from phonemic tags alone (Wolfe, Cook, McDonald, & Schnepp, 2011), producing believable, natural motion requires the model to also compute a number of sub-phonetic movements that are not included in linguistic annotation. These include subtleties in individual joint timings which, while not part of...
In signed languages, role shift is a process that can facilitate the description of statements, actions or thoughts of someone other than the person who is signing, and sign synthesis systems must be able to automatically create animations that portray it effectively. Animation is only as good as the data used to create it, which is the motivation...
A new extension to ELAN offers expanded n-gram analysis tools including improved search capabilities and an extensive library of statistical measures of association for n-grams. This paper presents an overview of the new tools and a case study in American Sign Language synthesis that exploits these capabilities for computing more natural timing in...
Effective translation from spoken to signed language requires a translation target that is visual in modality. Thus, the target must be a medium that supports the portrayal of human motion. Researchers are currently exploring a rich variety of media and sign generation systems that could serve as a translation target. Video recordings of signers en...
Computer-generated three-dimensional animation holds great promise for synthesizing utterances in American Sign Language (ASL) that are not only grammatical, but well-tolerated by members of the Deaf community. Unfortunately, animation poses several challenges stemming from the necessity of grappling with massive amounts of data. However, the lingu...
Translating from English to American Sign Language (ASL) requires an avatar to display synthesized ASL. Essential to the language are nonmanual signals that appear on the face. Previous avatars were hampered by an inability to portray emotion and facial nonmanual signals that occur at the same time. A new animation system addresses this challenge....
Sign language corpora serve many purposes, including linguistic analysis, curation of endangered languages, and evaluation of linguistic theories. They also have the potential to serve as an invaluable resource for improving sign language synthesis. Making corpora more accessible for synthesis requires geometric as well as linguistic data. We explo...
Computer-generated three-dimensional animation holds great promise for synthesizing utterances in American Sign Language (ASL) that are not only grammatical, but well-tolerated by members of the Deaf community. Unfortunately, animation poses several challenges stemming from the necessity of grappling with massive amounts of data. However, the lingu...
Synthetic corpora are computer representations of linguistic phenomena. They enable the creation of computer‐generated animations depicting sign languages and are the complement of corpora containing recorded exemplars. A current challenge in using synthetic corpora for this purpose is producing animations that are legible, linguistically acceptabl...
An essential component of an automatic speech‐to‐sign translator is a method of representing and depicting the target language. Unlike many spoken languages, sign languages do not have a universally‐ accepted written form, and depicting it convincingly is an open question. The goal of our work is to develop a representation capable of synthesizing...
Have you ever told your students to “use context” to help recognize fingerspelling? Have you received this advice yourself? Why is this good advice? Is it good advice? What does this advice do for us? Although there are plenty of anecdotes about using context to improve fingerspelling comprehension, there has never been a formal, controlled study t...
Although there has been substantive progress in the study of the manually-produced elements of sign languages, understanding the roles of nonmanual signals (NMS) is still an open area. Notations of onset and duration of static poses do not fully capture the structure and function of NMS. One of the goals of this effort has been to develop an approp...
Development of English literacy skills is a pervasive challenge in education programs for
deaf children in the United States. Literacy levels of deaf children are far lower than
those of hearing children of the same age, and this continues into adulthood. Many recent approaches use fingerspelling in efforts to improve reading skills in deaf childre...
Working effectively as a member of an interdisciplinary team is a skill highly valued by today's employers, but there are many challenges in providing this learning opportunity for students, including the equitable balance of responsibility among team members, an appropriate software environment and cost. A capstone course using Computer Graphics c...
Literacy is an essential skill for success in life. Higher literacy leads to improved
employment opportunities and greater earnings , but unfortunately, as a group, deaf children in the United States have poor reading skills The median reading comprehension score for deaf 17- and 18-
year-old high school students is at the 4th grade level.
Fingersp...
Our new fingerspelling practice software displays realistic animations of fingerspelling,
Many applications in computer animation portray the motion of a human arm and torso. Often such applications can benefit from a combination of Inverse (IK) and Forward (FK) Kinematics controls to manipulate the arms of the model. The human arm is a kinematic chain with seven degrees of freedom. The previous analytic solution to this kinematic chain...
Human–computer interaction (HCI) is an important knowledge component for graduate management information systems (MIS) and E-commerce (EC) programs. HCI topics, such as user-centered design and usability testing, have begun to receive increasing attention in MIS/EC curricula because of their importance in the development of Web-based solutions. Thi...
Airport security procedures pose accessibility problems for the Deaf. These procedures have
become more complex and intrusive as security measures have been reassessed. The Americans
with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the Air Carriers Access Act (ACAA) do specify
accommodations that airlines must make. However, the requirements specified in these a...
This paper examines the needs of students who, in the past, may have chosen to major in computer science or some other aspect of information technology as a way of achieving the goal of finding a job in the computer graphics field. The growth in computer graphics has lead to increased job opportunities in the industry. However, these jobs require f...
Many problems in computer graphics concern the precise positioning of a human figure, and in particular, the positioning of the joints in the upper body as a virtual character performs some action. We explore a new technique for precisely positioning the joints in the arms of a human figure to achieve a desired posture. We focus on an analytic solu...
Computer science students contemplating a career in graphics need to develop a visual sense, but traditional course topics do not meet this need. Visual analysis is a teaching technique developed for computer science instructors that helps impart this ability. Requiring a minimal amount of classroom time, visual analysis imparts a broad knowledge o...
Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is an important knowledge component for graduate IS and E-Commerce (IS/EC) programs. HCI topics, such as user-centered design and usability testing, are particularly critical to the development of Internet-based solutions, but have not yet gained enough attention in graduate IS/ECT programs. In this paper, we discus...
Those with disabilities have always had difficulty navigating airport security measures. In light of recent events and the resulting heightened security at major airports, this will only get worse. This paper examines a proposal to make airport security more accessible to the Deaf community by using a translation and display system for American Sig...
We present an improved anatomically based approach to modeling the human hand for use in the animation of American Sign Language. The joint rotations in the model are based on the bone and muscle configurations of the hand, and a forward kinematic solution is used to position the hand. In particular, we investigate the rotations of the base joint o...
This paper presents a nexus of the system: the database for storing geometric and linguistic information about signs and the transcription interface for creating signs
Usability tests have been conducted to obtain early feedback on animated computer graphics being developed to present translations of English into American Sign Language (ASL). These animations are part of development of a personal digital translator for the deaf. Since ASL is a visual language, it is particularly important that the animations be v...
American Sign Language (ASL) is the primary language used by the North American Deaf Community.
A system to interactively create and modify/edit American Sign Language signs is described. The system is grounded on the use of three-dimensional computer graphics to construct the signs.
American Sign Language (ASL) is the primary language used by the North American Deaf Community. We present our method for producing natural animations of fingerspelling, a functionally important subset of ASL. User testing demonstrates that our animations are readily identified by members of the deaf community.
Although it is a requisite skill for success in industry, visual literacy in graphics is intimidating to computer science and art students. Computer science majors are uneasy about using their eyes to examine images while art students may not have much background in the technical terminology. This column is the second in a two-part series that disc...
Instructors in both art and computer science departments experience difficulties in motivating students to develop a visual literacy in computer graphics. Although a highly prized skill in industry, visual literacy is intimidating to computer science students because they are uneasy about using their eyes to examine computer-synthesized images. Eve...
The field of computer graphics has matured greatly since the formal statement of the introductory undergraduate course for computer science majors was created for ACM/IEEE Curriculum 91, and introductory courses need to reflect the substantive changes in the discipline. Recent discussions with graphics educators and a syllabus survey have found six...
ABSTRACT Wepresent,an improved ,anatomically based approach ,to modeling ,the human ,hand for use in the animation of American ,Sign Language. The joint rotations in the model ,are based on the ,bone and muscle configurations of the hand, and a forward kinematic solution is used to position the hand. In particular, we investigate the rotations of t...
Computer science students contemplating a career in graphics need to develop a visual sense, but traditional course topics do not meet this need. Visual analysis is a teaching technique developed for computer science instructors that helps impart this ability. Through the use of a few visual cues, students learn to visually identify surface algorit...
The field of computer graphics has matured greatly since the formal statement of the introductory undergraduate course for computer science majors was created for ACM/IEEE Curriculum 91, and introductory courses need to reflect the substantive changes in the discipline. Recent discussions with graphics educators and a syllabus survey have found six...
This paper presents a collaborative team learning model for integrating student learning in a graduate IS course and a graduate HCI course. Through coordinated project schedules of partnering teams, an emphasis on social interaction, and the use of collaborative technologies, students expanded their experience in developing Internet commerce Web si...
Deafness is not only a barrier of sound but also a barrier of language. American
Sign Language (ASL) is a natural language used by members of the North American Deaf
community and is the third or fourth most widely used language in the United States [Ster96].
While ASL shares some vocabulary with English, there is no simple word-for-word translatio...
This column is the third in a series that re-examines the introductory computer graphics course for undergraduate computer science majors. In the ten years since the last format discussions on this subject, much has changed in the technology and practice of the discipline. To learn more about this change, several educators, including Scott Grissom,...
The field of computer graphics has matured greatly since the formal statement of the introductory undergraduate course was created for Curriculum 91, and courses must change accordingly. This panel will describe a philosophical basis for the changes and will give some examples of courses that are responding to that change.
The field of computer graphics has matured greatly since the formal statement of the introductory undergraduate course was created for Curriculum 91, and courses must change accordingly. This panel will describe a philosophical basis for the changes and will give some examples of courses that are responding to that change.
This column is the second in a series revisiting the introductory computer graphics course for undergraduate computer science majors. It has been 10 years since the last formal discussions resulted in a list of topics for Curriculum 91[1]. Given the great changes that have occurred in computer graphics during that time, the SIGGRAPH Education Commi...
The field of computer graphics has matured greatly since the formal statement of the introductory undergraduate course was created for Curriculum 91, and courses must change accordingly. This panel will describe a philosophical basis for the changes and will give some examples of courses that are responding to that change.
Visually demonstrating the behavior of texture mapping is beneficial to both computer science and art students. For computer science students it can serve as prelude to delving into the mathematical underpinnings of the topic, while in an art class it can be the main vehicle of explanation for students learning to use a rendering package as a mediu...
Every year, each Director on the SIGGRAPH Executive Committee compiles an annual report for the annual SIGGRAPH organization report. To keep the overall report from becoming a book, the SIGGRAPH Chair must pick highlights from each area. This issue's ...