Browsing by Author "Fontes, Rafael Reis"
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- Explicação Automática de ConceitosPublication . Fontes, Rafael Reis; Almeida, Ricardo Gabriel Soares Fernandes deTechnical terms are an essential part of all technical and scientific documentation, whether directed to education, to research or to labour. In education settings, there is a need to provide clear definitions of terms; using a glossary explaining the meaning of each technical term is paramount to enter a new study field. It is exactly at this last point that equity and inclusion issues originate. If we provide these definitions, or explanations using spoken languages in writing we leave apart all those who cannot fluently read them. Deaf people cannot read fluently. Sign languages and spoken languages are distinct languages. One cannot expect that a deaf person used to communicate via sign language can understand spoken language. When forcing deaf students to study via written spoken languages, we are putting them at a clear disadvantage and compromising equity. There is a need for a tool that can introduce and explain to deaf students technical or scientific concepts from specific areas of knowledge in sign language. This project aims to assist deaf students gaining access to education in their first language thus enhancing their learning experience by developing an online platform providing explana tions of technical terms in sign language. We expect that Text Mining and Information Extraction techniques can help generate expla nations of concepts that do not exist in the sign language lexicon that can then be translated and played in sign language. The purpose of this project is to develop the information extrac tion component that will generate the explanations in spoken language. These explanations will be translated to sign language using the VirtualSign Application Programming Interface (API). The developed solution involves an API designed to produce explanations for a word or concept, either by scraping online dictionaries or exploring text summarization. The API provides this information to a Web Application exposed to the users, and is responsible for receiving their input and displaying the information, along with the sign language translation using the VirtualSign avatar plugin. The solution was tested and surveyed by end-users being deemed a valuable step toward inclusive education.