Automatic Translation from Portuguese Natural Language to Portuguese Sign Language

Communication between deaf and non-deaf people is a difficult task in Portugal. Only a very small portion of the population is able to communicate with the impaired ones. Unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of systems which are available to the public to help in this communication.
In this paper we present a component to translate from Portuguese Natural Language to Portuguese Sign Language of a bigger system designed to allow communication between deaf and non-deaf via smartphones.
Our system uses a Neural Machine Translation system to provide translations between Portuguese And Portuguese Sign Language. Those translations are then used to animate a 3d avatar.