Where should I put my hands? Planning hand location in sign languages

This paper describes a corpus-based study addressing the spatial positioning of hands in Italian Sign Language (LIS). The corpus includes LIS sentences extracted from TV news concerning weather forecasting. The results shows that spatial relations depend on contextual and geographical features. These results have been exploited in the implementation of a planning module that generates a sequence of commands that drive the generator of a virtual character. The planner is part of an Italian to LIS translation system whose goal is the automatic translation of weather forecast program.