Current Research Projects

IICT is a four-year project with an overall budget of  12.3 million CHF supported by the Swiss Innovation Agency (Innosuisse) under its flagship scheme. The goal of the IICT flagship is to develop information and communication technologies (ICT) in the context of persons with disabilities. The flagship targets five applications: text simplification, sign language translation, sign language assessment, audio description, and spoken subtitles.
 

SMILE II aims to research and build advanced technology for sign language learning. More precisely, the project builds on the groundwork of the SNSF Sinergia project SMILE I, which dealt with assessment of the manual activity of Swiss German Sign Language (Deutschschweizerische Gebärdensprache, DSGS) in isolated signs produced by L1 users and L2 learners. SMILE II extends this technology to continuous sign language assessment including both manual and non-manual components of signs so that a DSGS learner’s sentence-level production can be assessed in an automatic manner.

This project has at its core research into semi-automatic language sample analysis. The focus is on the development and evaluation of a software which can be used to support speech therapists in the diagnostics of language disorders in children. In a first phase, the goal is to create a corpus with spontaneous speech of children of ages four to six with typical and atypical language development in Swiss German and Standard German. This data is then used to train automatic speech recognition and automatic language sample analysis models. The process targeted is semi-automatic, with a human (i.e., an expert) in the loop.