I stand corrected, thanks. There's a lot of info on the internet that says a written form of ASL doesn't exist, which is what I found when I Googled it.
Looking into it, it seems very much at the experimental stage in terms of digital representation -- while Unicode symbols exist, they require being placed in 2D boxes (using a drawing tool like SVG). It seems like it's only in the past few years that there have been proposals for how to turn it into a linear canonical text encoding?
Is anyone actually using those linear encodings -- SignPuddle or Formal SignWriting, they seem to be called -- in the wild, outside of demonstration texts or academia? Especially since they only date to 2016 and 2019.
Is there anywhere close at all to a corpus that Meta could train on? Because it still seems like the answer is no, but I also got my research wrong when Google gave no indication that SignWriting existed in the first place.
SignWriting has been documented at National Deafness section in California State University of Northridge South Library since 1968 and at Gallaudet University, Washington, D.C. since 1950s.
That's great, but it doesn't have anything to do with the points I raised.
Which is that I can't find any indication of a linear digital encoding that has been used to any appreciable extent that Meta could train on a corpus of it.
Which is why I'm struggling to understand why you're criticizing Meta? How could they realistically train a linear text model on ASL when the necessary content doesn't appear to exist?
Looking into it, it seems very much at the experimental stage in terms of digital representation -- while Unicode symbols exist, they require being placed in 2D boxes (using a drawing tool like SVG). It seems like it's only in the past few years that there have been proposals for how to turn it into a linear canonical text encoding?
Is anyone actually using those linear encodings -- SignPuddle or Formal SignWriting, they seem to be called -- in the wild, outside of demonstration texts or academia? Especially since they only date to 2016 and 2019.
Is there anywhere close at all to a corpus that Meta could train on? Because it still seems like the answer is no, but I also got my research wrong when Google gave no indication that SignWriting existed in the first place.