MIT Lincoln Laboratory Intern Innovative Idea Challenge - Final Round - First Place
MIT Lincoln Laboratory Intern Innovative Idea Challenge - Round Two - Best Poster Award
ENVOY is a system that will allow natural-language communication between ASL and non-ASL users. This is done by translating ASL to English, and then English back to ASL. Applications that are in development today try to focus on translating ASL to spoken or written English and stop there. This project is intended to ‘complete the circuit’ by translating the non-ASL user’s response into ASL. We are proposing this idea because ASL speakers prefer to communicate in, well, ASL!
The two biggest challenges facing ASL translation are the lack of large datasets to train systems and unreliable language models. In this project, we propose two solutions that can help alleviate this problems and allow two-way communication for deaf or hard-of-hearing individuals.
This project is a part of the ‘Intern Innovative Idea Challenge’ (I3C) that is done during the summer at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. Projects are proposed to laboratory staff to decide which get funded and added to development.
Thanks to everyones hard work, we were able to secure funding to continue creating this system for MIT Lincoln Laboratory!
