Hariri Faculty Affiliate Carol Neidle Awarded through NSF Convergence Accelerator

Hariri Faculty Affiliate Carol Neidle received an NSF award through the NSF Convergence Accelerator program. This is a collaboration with Principal Investigators Dimitris Metaxas and Mariapaola D’Imperio of Rutgers University and Matt Huenerfauth of Rochester Institute of Technology. These researchers were awarded almost $1 million, with the money going towards the development of “Data & AI Methods for Modeling Facial Expressions in Language with Applications to Privacy for the Deaf, American Sign Language (ASL) Education & Linguistic Research.” This team is composed of linguists, computer scientists, deaf and hearing experts on ASL, and industry partners. Facial expressions and head gestures are an essential part of signed languages, and ASL is the primary means of communication for over 500,000 people in the United States. ASL is the third most studied “foreign” language in the US, and this research will contribute to the community of ASL signers and ASL learners.

There are three goals of this research. The first goal is to develop tools to help research into the role of facial expressions in signed as well as spoken language. The second is to develop an application to help learners of ASL as a second language produce the facial expressions and head gestures that are essential to the grammar of the language, one of the biggest challenges when learning ASL as a second language. The third goal is to develop an application that can let ASL users have private conversations, de-identifying the signer in video communications while preserving the necessary linguistic information expressed non-manually. ASL users seeking private communication have a real problem, since obscuring the face results in loss of important linguistic information. This project will develop technology to enable anonymization for ASL videos. These three goals will address research and societal challenges related to signed and spoken languages, helping diverse user and research communities.

Professor Carol Neidle is a professor of general linguistics and French linguistics at Boston University. She received her Bachelor of Arts at Yale College, her MA at Middlebury College, and PhD at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Professor Neidle is the Director of the American Sign Language Linguistic Research Project (ASLLRP). Professor Neidle’s areas of interest for research include syntactic theory and the linguistic structure of American Sign Language.

The NSF Convergence Accelerator issued its first set of awards in 2019. This new NSF program accelerates use-inspired, convergence research areas that are important nationally. The Convergence Accelerator seeks to create partnerships and bring together people from across disciplines and industry to address societal challenges and provide real solutions for the problems.