A Personalisable Electronic Book for Video-based Sign Language ...

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In this paper, we present a personalisable electronic book, Kids Sign Online (KSO) (Naqvi, S et al, 2003)., that supports the learning of British Sign Language (Flodin M, 1994) to deaf children and their tutors. The system’s uniqueness lies in its use of personalisation and adaptation (P&A) techniques, incorporated with digital video content, in the development of WWW-based electronic books for children. The British Deaf Association states that: “Deaf people have the right to a quality education throughout their lives, which accepts their linguistic, cultural and social identity, which builds positive self-esteem and sets no limit to their learning.” (British Deaf Association, 2001). If such an aspiration is to be realised, we believe that it is crucial that educational materials found on the WWW are adapted to suit the needs of the deaf. The research reported in this paper is motivated by the view that through the application of P&A techniques, it will be possible to provide deaf students with equal access to WWW-based educational resources. Through the use of P&A techniques and digital sign-language content, KSO aims to assist deaf students in the individualised learning of sign language. Within the system, the teacher is realised as a composer and tailor of digital content that makes personalised digital video, textual descriptions and exercises available to students. By providing an adaptive WWW-based sign language education system, we hope to broaden the accessibility of sign language learning materials. Furthermore, we aim to illustrate how AH tools and techniques may be used to address issues related to the education of the deaf in online learning environments. The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. In section 2 we provide the motivations for our work in the areas of educational AH systems and sign language systems. Section 3 provides an overview of the Goldsmiths Adaptive Hypermedia Model, which provides the framework and architecture for KSO. In section 4, we describe how the system dynamically generates personalisable educational sign language material. Section 5 describes how P&A features of KSO are implemented, and how they are made available to students. This section also describes features that enable students to search for personalised video content and describes the assessment subsystem used to provide students with exercises to assess their learning. Section 6 provides a brief overview of additional features that are found within KSO. These are an online sign language dictionary and digital video fairytale stories. Section 7 highlights related work and compares it to the work contributed by this paper. Finally, section 8 contains conclusions and future directions for research. Background and Motivations The potential for using AH systems to address issues of learning has long been recognised (Beaumont I & Brusilovsky P, 1995; Brusilovsky P et al, 1996). The predominant application area has been education (Kay J & Kummerfeld R J, 1994; Brusilovsky P et al, 1996; De Bra P, 1997; De Bra P, 1998). Early lab-based systems, such as these, were concerned with how AH techniques could be applied in an educational context. With the emergence of large-scale distributed hypermedia systems, such as the WWW, many online AH educational systems have been proposed (Weber G & Specht M, 1997; Steinacker A et al, 1998; Brusilovsky P, 1999; Stern M K & Woolf B P, 2000; Ng M H et al, 2002). Broadly, all these systems have a similar goal: to provide features that allow users to personalise, or have the system adapt, digital educational content. P&A features implemented by systems include: link hiding and annotation (Culver & De Bra P, 1997; Kay J& Kummerfeld B, 1995), the incorporation of visual clues to assist learners (Brusilovsky P & Pesin L, 1995), the tailoring of content and its presentation (Specht & Oppermann, 1998; Ng M H et al, 2002), selective content (Ohene-Djan J & Fernandes AAA, 2002), and tailoring options for traversal through the inclusion of additional supplementary links (De Bra P & Calvi I, 1998). A review of recent AH concepts and issues can be found in (Brusilovsky P, 2001). In this paper, we define personalisation to be the user-initiated tailoring of hyperdocuments. Adaptivity is defined to be system-driven personalisation. In order to understand how AH research can benefit the design of sign language educational systems, it is first useful to consider some of the reading, writing and teaching issues associated with the education of the deaf. Historically, deaf children were only taught to lip-read and speak (Fischer R & Lane H, 1993). As a result of their impediment, the reading levels of the deaf are generally of a lower standard than those of their hearing counterparts (Schleper D R & Mahshie S N, June 1997). Furthermore, those who are taught sign language as their primary mode of communication are potentially further disadvantaged when reading printed books or WWW-based textual content. 87
A sign language is not a word-by-word translation of a spoken language, but is a language in its own right. Sign languages, such as American Sign Language (Sternberg M L, 1996) and British Sign Language (Sutton-Spence R & Woll B, 1999), differ significantly in their syntax and semantics from American or British English. Therefore, the relationship between written English and sign language is very different from the relationship between written English and spoken English. Written English is a foreign language to native speakers of sign languages. In sign languages movements, body positions and expressions are integral parts of the syntax. These do not easily translate to written texts. Furthermore, printed text often uses phraseology and grammatical constructs that make word by word translation difficult, if not impossible (Coleman J R & Wolf E E, 1991). As a result, printed text must nearly always be translated, by the teacher, into sign language, on behalf of the student, in real time. This process is expensive in terms of time and teaching resources and requires a high level of expertise. One approach to making printed, or WWW-based, educational materials accessible to deaf children is to establish a pictorial representation of the vocabulary and syntax of a sign language. These representations are called writing systems (Sutton V, 1996). Specifically, sign language writing systems use a set of visually designed symbols that record how people sign, thereby representing the visual subtleties of sign language. Although several proposals for sign language writing systems have been made (Sutton V, 1997), and tentative steps have been taken towards providing software-based sign language translators such as the SignWriting Markup Language, SWML (da Rocha Costa A C, 2003), to allow for the automatic generation of electronic texts written in sign language, there is still no universally accepted writing system for sign languages. In the absence of a universally accepted writing system, video has emerged as the primary technological platform used to present educational material to the deaf. Signing books (Pragma, 2002) are video presentations of textual material. They are analogous to talking books for the blind. In such books, a narrator is recorded on videotape while signing the content of the book. The signing may be complemented by subtitles and other visual clues (i.e., graphics, animations, etc.). As signing books are presented via video, they inherit the inherent weaknesses of the medium. Videotape is inefficient to navigate through: a user must linearly shuttle backwards and forwards through the tape, as no direct access mechanism is available. Furthermore, users are unable to search for a specific phrase or topic. There are no contextual links for browsing and no table of contents to locate particular subjects. Finally, videotape degrades with repeated use. These weaknesses become particularly evident when such books are used for educational purposes. The deficiencies in videotape technology are a motivating factor for our use of hypermedia technologies as a platform for the delivery of sign language learning materials. The ability of hypermedia systems to make nonlinear context based navigation available to users, through the inclusion of hyperlinks, and their ability to make use of computational resources to dynamically manage content, suggests that this medium may be a more appropriate delivery platform. Furthermore, content accessible via hypermedia systems is stored digitally and is therefore not subject to degradation through repeated use. In the case of AH, we propose that users could benefit from possibilities, not only related to the medium, but to the design of the software itself. Adaptive hypermedia technologies are starting to prove effective in performing information retrieval tasks when users have different information seeking goals and histories (Karagiannidis C et al, 2001; Bajraktarevic N et al, 2003). The ability of these techniques to tailor the content made available on an individual basis and the ability to adapt this content to the specific knowledge that a user has of a subject could yield similar advantages to the deaf learner. Furthermore, the ability of adaptive hypermedia systems to tailor link presentation, in order to direct and assist users in their online learning, appears to make adaptive hypermedia techniques and technologies good candidates for use in the development of sign language education systems. KSO Electronic Book Framework and Systems Architecture In this section, we outline our view of electronic books, and provide an overview of the Goldsmiths Adaptive Hypermedia Model. This formal model was used as the systems architecture in the design of the KSO adaptive electronic book. In this paper, we define the content of an Electronic Book (E-book) to be a hyperlinked network of digital information units. When these information units are rendered, they provide the user with optional links to other information units. A rendering unit in an E-book is viewed as a hyperpage, and a collection of units as a hypermedia presentation. Such presentations are accessible via a WWW-browser (e.g., Galeon, Firebird, 88
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Page 9 and 10: Figure 9. KSO’s Online Dictionary
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Page 13 and 14: Coleman, J. R. & Wolf, E. E., (1991

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