American Sign Language and Cyber

A recent article from the University of Boston provides a very refreshing article about cyber technology helping the deaf. The words “joke” and “ruin” might not rhyme in English - but, thanks to a new, interactive database of American Sign Language (ASL), called ASL-LEX 2.0[1], we can now see that these two words do in fact rhyme in ASL.

“In ASL, each word has five linguistic parameters: handshape, movement, location, palm orientation, and non-manual signs. Rhymes involve repetition based on one or more of these parameters,” says a first-year PhD student in Boston University’s (BU) Wheelock College of Education & Human Development’s Language & Literacy Education program. The student is deaf and has been using the ASL-LEX 2.0 database to investigate the relationship between ASL and English proficiency in deaf children. Since launching in February 2021, in conjunction with a published paper highlighting the ways the database has expanded, ASL-LEX 2.0 — now the largest interactive ASL database in the world — makes learning about the fundamentals of ASL easier and more accessible. “ASL-LEX 2.0 is an invaluable resource. Being able to access linguistic information, including the five parameters on every sign, in one place is enormously helpful,” says the doctoral student.[2]

“English speakers know cat and hat rhyme in English, and we have all kinds of resources for thinking about the properties of English, French, and many spoken languages, but at the outset we really didn’t know much about the lexicon of ASL,” says a BU Wheelock assistant professor and researcher of Deaf Studies who helped create the database and leads its LexLab.[3] A lexicon is the vocabulary that makes up a language for ASL. The lexicon describes the language’s entire universe of movements and sign forms.

It took BU researchers and their collaborators at San Diego State University and Tufts University have invested six years of work to create ASL-LEX 2.0, which improves upon an earlier version of the database created by the team, first released in 2016, called ASL-LEX. In 2017, ASL-LEX was awarded the Vizzie’s People’s Choice prize for best interactive visualization. With the help of a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation, the expanded 2.0 version of the original site is now bolstered with over 2,723 signs and more ways to visualize the ASL lexicon. Computer engineers from BU’s Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering played a major role in the project, working in collaboration with the researchers to rebuild the site from the ground up with more sophisticated tools for data visualizations. The database’s collection of “phonology” or sign forms, in ASL, phonology refers to how a sign looks and is formed, whereas in verbal speech it refers to the sounds the speaker produces, is organized based on hand shapes, hand locations, and finger movements. Groups of signs, called “nodes,” are then associated with one another based on whether or not they rhyme, or share patterns in how they are formed. Using colors to visually group similar phonologies together, ASL-LEX 2.0 allows users to navigate between nodes, almost like a map.

Red Sky Alliance has been has analyzing and documenting these type of cyber threats for 9 years and maintains a resource library of malware and cyber actor reports available at https://redskyalliance.org at no charge. Many past tactics are often dusted off and reused in current malicious campaigns. Red Sky Alliance can provide actionable cyber intelligence and weekly blacklists to help protect your network.

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