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The aim of this paper is to explore the impact of efforts by some municipalities to place various restrictions on on‐premise signs and to examine the impact of strict regulations on local communities.

Provides examples of restrictive sign codes and reviews articles providing empirical evidence on public perceptions of signs as well as the impact of signs on businesses and communities.

Excessive regulation of signs is counterproductive; contrary to the beliefs of proponents of harsh restrictions, signs are helpful to consumers and business, and they contribute to a community's economic vitality.

In developing and implementing sign codes, municipalities should consider what research tells us about the value of on‐premise signs. Members of the general public who have an interest in municipal affairs should consider research findings when forming opinions about the regulation of signs as opposed to relying on a limited number of individuals who may ignore the marketing functions of signs in developing and implementing sign codes.

Demonstrates the importance of signage to consumers, businesses, and local communities.

This paper seeks to describe how signs can be used as a part of the work task scenarios with service robot.

The signs are used to control a work task of a mobile service robot. Tests are done in real outdoor and non‐structured environments with the WorkPartner robot. In the test scenario the signs are used to define the boundaries of a working area. Two different kinds of signs are tested: passive and active.

The signs can be used as a simple way to define the parameters of a work task. One of the advantages is usability. For example, the signs can just be carried to the working area and no other actions are needed.

The tests focused only on bounding the working area with signs. Using the signs for pointing a direction, marking a route, or defining a location of a single target will be tested in the future.

Signs are an easy way to configure work tasks of service robots. The concept can be applied to various kinds of mobile robots.

The signs are introduced as an alternative or complementary tool for passing information of the task plan of a work task from the human operator to the service robot.

A conceptual model of a minimum set of subsystems contributing to the total system of human communication is hypothesized in which are identified four “domains”: a referent world, a formulator, an interpreter, and signs. The usefulness of the model relies on its apparent independence from metaphysical conflicts.

This study aims to investigate multilingual representation on public signs in the High City tourist destination in Abha, Saudi Arabia. It also reveals the linguistic strategies used in such representation.

This exploratory qualitative study used purposive sampling to analyze bottom-up public signs collected from the target tourist destination. A preliminary analysis was conducted for a more in-depth qualitative analysis of every sign. An Excel database was used to provide a general description and a preliminary reading of the strategies before using an in-depth analysis of every sign.

The study revealed that monolingualism (Arabic or English) and bilingualism (Arabic and English) represented the High City as a tourist destination where the signs served information and symbolic functions. No single multilingual sign was found. Certain linguistic strategies were used on the public signs, including politeness, transliteration, hybrid representation, personification and fragmentary. Some tourist-oriented strategies, such as the crisis communication strategy, are still missing.

These findings indicate that this tourist destination still targets local and regional visitors, and its linguistic landscape (LL) needs further consideration in terms of internationalization and targeting international visitors. This study implies that bilingual Arabic and English tourist destinations are potential domains for translation students and English language learners.

This study has focused on the LL of a newly established tourist destination in Saudi Arabia. It has shed light on the nuanced representations and strategies used through public signage. It contributes to understanding how linguistic elements can shape tourists’ perceptions and experiences.

According to the Indian Sign Language Research and Training Centre (ISLRTC), India has approximately 300 certified human interpreters to help people with hearing loss. This paper aims to address the issue of Indian Sign Language (ISL) sentence recognition and translation into semantically equivalent English text in a signer-independent mode.

This study presents an approach that translates ISL sentences into English text using the MobileNetV2 model and Neural Machine Translation (NMT). The authors have created an ISL corpus from the Brown corpus using ISL grammar rules to perform machine translation. The authors’ approach converts ISL videos of the newly created dataset into ISL gloss sequences using the MobileNetV2 model and the recognized ISL gloss sequence is then fed to a machine translation module that generates an English sentence for each ISL sentence.

As per the experimental results, pretrained MobileNetV2 model was proven the best-suited model for the recognition of ISL sentences and NMT provided better results than Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) to convert ISL text into English text. The automatic and human evaluation of the proposed approach yielded accuracies of 83.3 and 86.1%, respectively.

It can be seen that the neural machine translation systems produced translations with repetitions of other translated words, strange translations when the total number of words per sentence is increased and one or more unexpected terms that had no relation to the source text on occasion. The most common type of error is the mistranslation of places, numbers and dates. Although this has little effect on the overall structure of the translated sentence, it indicates that the embedding learned for these few words could be improved.

Sign language recognition and translation is a crucial step toward improving communication between the deaf and the rest of society. Because of the shortage of human interpreters, an alternative approach is desired to help people achieve smooth communication with the Deaf. To motivate research in this field, the authors generated an ISL corpus of 13,720 sentences and a video dataset of 47,880 ISL videos. As there is no public dataset available for ISl videos incorporating signs released by ISLRTC, the authors created a new video dataset and ISL corpus.

This paper reviews research developments in semiosis (sign activity) as theorized by Peirce, Eco and Sebeok, focusing specifically on the current study of “semiotic threshold zones,” which range from the origins of life through various nonhuman life forms to artificial life forms, including those symbolic thresholds most familiar to library and information science (LIS) researchers. The intent is to illustrate potential opportunities for LIS research beyond its present boundaries.

The paper provides a framework that describes six semiotic threshold zones (presemiotic, protosemiotic, phytosemiotic, zoosemiotic, symbolic and polysemiotic) and notable work being done by researchers in each.

While semiotic researchers are still defining the continuum of semiotic thresholds, this focus on thresholds can provide a unifying framework for significance as human and nonhuman interpretations of a wide variety of signs accompanied by a better understanding of their relationships becomes more urgent in a rapidly changing global environment.

Though a variety of semiotic-related topics have appeared in the LIS literature, semiotic thresholds and their potential relationships to LIS research have not been previously discussed there. LIS has traditionally tasked itself with the recording, dissemination and preservation of knowledge, and in a world that faces unprecedented environmental and global challenges for all species, the importance of these thresholds may well be considered as part of our professional obligations in potentially documenting and archiving the critical differences in semiosis that extend beyond purely human knowledge.

The purpose of the paper is to examine and compare Nicholas Belkin's information concept and his concept of communication with the authors' semeiotic inspired communication model – the Dynacom.

The authors compare the two communication models by comparing the requirements given by Belkin and the conditions of the Dynacom.

The authors conclude that Belkin's idea of information and his idea of communication lack the social aspect. Based on his theory, he is unable to point out how information becomes knowledge. These are two major issues the authors believe they can elaborate on by introducing the Dynacom and their semeiotic inspired concept of information.

No one has previously specifically analyzed Nicholas Belkin's concept of information and compared it to a semeiotic ditto.

Signs saturate and surround society. This article illuminates the significant roles played by documentation within the context of the coronavirus pandemic. It centres, what it terms as, “COVID-19 signage” as essential extensions of nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) into society. It posits that this signage helps materialize, mediate and articulate the pandemic from an unseen phenomenon into tangible objects with which people see and interact.

This article presents a documentary typology of COVID-19 signage to provide a conceptual framework in which to situate, approach and analyse this diverse documentation and its implications for social life and traffic. Further, this article offers a case study of Malta's COVID-19 signage that helped materialize, mediate and articulate the pandemic across the European island nation during its national lockdown in the first half of 2020. This case study helps contextualize these signs and serves as a dual contemporary and historical overview of their creation, implementation and use.

The coronavirus pandemic cannot be seen with the naked eye. It is, in many respects, an abstraction. Documents enable the virus to be seen and the pandemic to be an experienced reality. Specifically, COVID-19 signage materializes the disease and pandemic into tangible items that individuals interact with and see on a daily basis as they navigate society. From personal to environmental to community signs, these documents have come to mediate social life and articulate COVID-19 during this extraordinary health crisis. A material basis of a shared “pandemic social culture” is consequently established by and through this signage and its ubiquity.

This article can serve as a point of departure for analyses of other kinds of COVID-19 signage in various contexts. It can serve as an anchor or example for other investigations into what other signs were used, including why, when and how they were produced, designed, formatted, implemented, enforced, altered and/or removed. For instance, it could be used for comparative studies between different NPIs and their associated signage, or of the signage appearing between different cities or countries or even the differences in signage at various political and socio-temporal points of the pandemic.

It is dually hoped that this article's documentary typology, and historical snapshot, of COVID-19 signage could help inform how current and future NPIs into society are or can be used to mitigate the coronavirus or other potential health crises as well as serve as both a contemporary and historical snapshot of some of the immediate and early responses to the pandemic.

This documentary typology can be applied to approaches and analyses of other kinds of COVID-19 signage and related documentation. By serving as a conceptual framework in which situate, approach and analyse these documents, it is hoped that this article can help create a sense of clarity in reflections on sign-saturated environments as well as be practically employed for examining and understanding the effective implementation of NPIs in this pandemic and other health crises.

Aims to address some of the problems that arise when signing digital documents that contain dynamic content.

Briefly introduces the problem of signing digital documents with dynamic content and discusses possible locations for signature functionality in a computer system. Outlines existing solutions to the problems and introduces a novel solution. Finally, discusses issues and unresolved problems.

The suggested solution requires all document handling applications to possess application awareness of the digital signature program in order to function properly. Every application must implement a COM interface and register itself in the Registry, in a locale specific to the digital signature program to sign the digital document.

Provides a new solution to the problem of digitally signing a digital document.

Deaf communities including the Irish one, often identify the status of their signed languages as one of the defining indicators of their social standings. Thus, social justice measures must be intertwined with the status of signed languages. The social justice issues for Deaf communities identified here are: access to media, recognition of signed languages and education. These issues are based on several research data and are described in brief. The purpose of this paper is to locate the situational position of Deaf communities in Ireland.

To understand the way in which a more radical model of equality would work for the Irish Deaf community, the author discusses an equality framework developed by the Equality Studies Centre in University College Dublin, with the aim of advancing understanding of what equality of condition would mean for Deaf people in relation to the access to media, recognition of signed languages and education.

The evidence from research and literature shows the serious disadvantaged position held by the Deaf communities in Ireland and other countries. The data presented alone show how both discrimination and disadvantages are largely due to negative perspectives on deafness. These negative perspectives are obviously influenced by historical, medical and religious factors.

The article raises awareness of the implications of different levels of equality on the status of signed languages. These levels, by default, affect the socio‐economic statuses of Deaf communities. It is obvious from this study that equality of condition is the best option for Deaf communities to achieve. This option demands a level of recognition and respect for signed languages, equal to that afforded to national and dominant languages. This would help to minimise the belief that signed languages are mere compensatory tools, which in turn, would create more egalitarian treatment for Deaf people who wished to pursue their main identity through the use of signed languages.