Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!ut-emx!ccwf.cc.utexas.edu From: clouds@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu (Kathy Strong) Newsgroups: comp.ivideodisc Subject: Re: Interactive videodisc project--American Sign Language Summary: Sherman, this is the LAST time... Message-ID: <40113@ut-emx.uucp> Date: 24 Nov 90 20:09:23 GMT References: <40067@ut-emx.uucp> Sender: news@ut-emx.uucp Reply-To: clouds@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu (Kathy Strong) Lines: 62 More discussion on the ASL project was mistakenly send as email instead of posted... Here it is. ----------------------------- From: Sherman Wilcox To: clouds@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu Subject: Re: Interactive videodisc project--American Sign Language Newsgroups: comp.ivideodisc In-Reply-To: <40067@ut-emx.uucp> Organization: University of New Mexico, Albuquerque Cc: In article <40067@ut-emx.uucp> you write: >(This is Kathy talking now...) What are the radicals of an ASL word? >Gesture? Direction? Hand shape? Distance? Position near body? > In the work of William Stokoe that I mentioned, he identified what have come to be called the parameters of an ASL word (the equivalent, I think, of what you are calling the radicals): handshape, movement, and location. I fourth parameter was later proposed by other linguists, hand (palm) orientation. Stokoe developed a writing system for ASL based on these parameters. More recently, a writing system called "SignFont" was developed by Emerson & Stern (the same folks that I've seen mentioned lately doing development on speech recognition systems for Mac). The E&S system uses four parameters too: handshape, movement, location, and what they called "action area." We plan to use any & all of these systems in coding ASL words for retriebval in the ASL Hypermedia Dictionary. We hope that one of the advantages of building in hooks to a relational database is that we will be able to have multiple or redundant codings. This will allow us to have only citation forms on the real-estate-poor videodisks, but store codings in the real-estate rich database for variant forms (words signed or "pronounced" slightly differently, for example). And now, a question for anyone out there who might be reading this. I keep hearing that we will soon have the technology to do a project like this on CD-ROM. Does anyone have any idea approximately how much full-motion video we can expect to store on a CD-ROM? I realize this depends on many things (as I understand it, picture size, frames per second, compression factors, etc). Any ballpark figures? Sherman Wilcox Dept. of Linguistics University of New Mexico ----------------------- About CD-ROM: it's my understanding that a videodisc holds about 3.5 gigabytes of information, and a CD-ROM about 0.6 gigs. Can anyone confirm or dispute these figures? My grey matter is notoriously unreliable... --K -- ........................................................................... : Kathy Strong : "Try our Hubble-Rita: just one shot, : : (Clouds moving slowly) : and everything's blurry" : : clouds@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu : --El Arroyo : :..........................................................................: