Enhancing Portuguese Sign Language Animation with Dynamic Timing and Mouthing

TL;DR

This paper introduces a dynamic transition approach for Portuguese Sign Language avatars, emphasizing mouthing animations to improve comprehension and naturalness, especially for novice learners, with implications across multiple fields.

Contribution

It presents a novel method for dynamic sign transitions and mouthing animations, enhancing avatar naturalness and comprehension for learners.

Findings

Dynamic transitions preferred but not significantly affecting naturalness

Mouthing behaviors improved comprehension and perceived naturalness

Implications for computational linguistics and human-computer interaction

Abstract

Current signing avatars are often described as unnatural as they cannot accurately reproduce all the subtleties of synchronized body behaviors of a human signer. In this paper, we propose a new dynamic approach for transitions between signs, focusing on mouthing animations for Portuguese Sign Language. Although native signers preferred animations with dynamic transitions, we did not find significant differences in comprehension and perceived naturalness scores. On the other hand, we show that including mouthing behaviors improved comprehension and perceived naturalness for novice sign language learners. Results have implications in computational linguistics, human-computer interaction, and synthetic animation of signing avatars.