Phonological Proximity in Costa Rican Sign Language
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The article addresses a novel problem,
Below are some comments:
1) add citation for the law in Introduction.
2)Introduction and literature review are difficult to follow and long.
3) no sign image (add some images of hands)
4) details of dataset should be described, how many instances of signs with respect to types of signs.
5) describe what is range and count in the caption of figures.
6) label x and y-axis in the figure 7
7) could you describe your parameters of hands and how someone can automatically detect them to use your findings for automatic recognition task?
8) how did you optimized the K parameter for clustering
9) The article is too long which making it confusing.
10) Figure 9, 10 and 11: no description of colours, add legends maybe.
11) The authors should decide altogether what figures/text to add/remove. Add/improve those figures which are adding values to the readers.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The authors have studied the problem of phonological proximity in LESCO, which could have as possible applications the area of sign language teaching or the automatic sign recognition.
In my opinion the paper has a practical contribution, but for a very specific audience, since it deals with the Costa Rican Sign Language.
The authors considered a very wide Literature and also theoretical basis, which didn't mention sign languages. Thus, they should make an effort to generalise their methodology also for other languages: I would suggest to describe some general steps starting from the Lessons Learned so that their results could be useful for researchers in linguistics.
I would add in the Introduction the main aim/contributions of the paper: they are clearly stated in the conclusions.
The notion of context should be introduced or better clarified, at least informally, at the beginning of the paper, since it seems really important for the developed methodology.
I would add a general methodology for clustering any sign language (I would write Section 3 in as general as possible).
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
In this paper, the authors proposed an analysis of different similarity measures between signs in order to find out the phonological proximity between them. The experimental results show that LESCO is a sign language with high levels of phonological proximity, particularly in the orientation and location components, but they are noticeably lower in the form component. In the opinion of reviewer, it is interesting and well organized. However, it has some problems that need to be solved further.
- In the background, Figure 1 is Naumann classification of similarity measures. However, Figure 1 is not clear enough. It is suggested that the author use a color Figure.
- There are some unclear Figures, such as Figure 2, 7 and 8. The authors should improve the resolution of these Figures.
- In the conclusion, the description of the conclusion is too more. It is suggested that the authors should simplify this part and add some key simulation results (data).
In order to qualify for publication in Electronics, the article must be improved according to the comments to the authors.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
The authors significantly improved the article and it is now in much better shape.
I have two comments to point out
1) it is better two mention in the caption of figures what the cluster actually mean.
2) the X, Y and Z axis are PCA_{1}, PCA_{2} and PCA_{3}. Please check
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The paper has been improved a lot, now it can be a reference also for other researchers working on similar languages.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
Thank the authors for their efforts. The authors have adequately addressed
all my concerns in the review, and did a good job to revise and improve
the paper. The paper now is suitable for publication in Electronics in
its current form.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
