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> The real technological solution that would be helpful is still a few more major advancements away. It needs to handle grammar (ASL has radically different gra

by smeeth 4y ago

> The real technological solution that would be helpful is still a few more major advancements away. It needs to handle grammar (ASL has radically different grammar than most spoken languages fyi). Going from a spoken language to a sign language is also significantly more useful. FWIW I do ML research and these sound very possible with todays tech. I could probably hackathon this. This sounds more like a classic case of "engineer doesn't know what the users need" or "normie doesn't understand the actual life/needs of the disabled." It sounds like you should set up a hackathon! Or at least publish some information so that future hackathon participants don't fall into the common tropes.

blamestross 4y ago
By "different" I mean radically different. It's a different medium with different possibilities and challenges. I only know ASL other sign languages are less related to each other than spoken languages are (exception ASL derives strongly from French sign language) The root problem is that language concepts from spoken/written languages don't map 1-1 onto. Some examples: - "pronouns" (really "referring to anybody or anything who isn't here to point at) are spacial. Things get assigned a location in the conversation to be gestured towards to reference them. This requires a level of spacial recognition that doesn't exist yet outside of VR with a lot of hardware. (Extra challenge recognizing the location of things that ARE NOT ACTUALLY THERE) - descriptor/word order are very context sensitive (basically whatever order the signer thinks will refine things down for the watcher) It doesn't encode well to enable the alignment based translations. Encodings exist for teaching purposes, but they are not easy to use for more relaxed used (that's is what signing is for). Corpuses don't exist for that either. Modern translation techniques double down on having a large corpus and that basically all written languages have similar syntax structures even if the representations differ. Yes the "technology" exists in the same sense we know how to colonize the asteroids. We don't need a radical improvement of technology, just somebody to bother investing for decades without return. A hackathon isn't going to cross that void.
- blamestross 4y ago
  Oh and I'm bad at it, so I forget, but facial expression and emoting are an entire grammar side-channel that we don't have machines to effectively emulate.

by smeeth 4y ago

blamestross 4y ago

By "different" I mean radically different. It's a different medium with different possibilities and challenges. I only know ASL other sign languages are less related to each other than spoken languages are (exception ASL derives strongly from French sign language) The root problem is that language concepts from spoken/written languages don't map 1-1 onto. Some examples: - "pronouns" (really "referring to anybody or anything who isn't here to point at) are spacial. Things get assigned a location in the conversation to be gestured towards to reference them. This requires a level of spacial recognition that doesn't exist yet outside of VR with a lot of hardware. (Extra challenge recognizing the location of things that ARE NOT ACTUALLY THERE) - descriptor/word order are very context sensitive (basically whatever order the signer thinks will refine things down for the watcher) It doesn't encode well to enable the alignment based translations. Encodings exist for teaching purposes, but they are not easy to use for more relaxed used (that's is what signing is for). Corpuses don't exist for that either. Modern translation techniques double down on having a large corpus and that basically all written languages have similar syntax structures even if the representations differ. Yes the "technology" exists in the same sense we know how to colonize the asteroids. We don't need a radical improvement of technology, just somebody to bother investing for decades without return. A hackathon isn't going to cross that void.

blamestross 4y ago
Oh and I'm bad at it, so I forget, but facial expression and emoting are an entire grammar side-channel that we don't have machines to effectively emulate.