Yes it matters. I didn&#x27;t say anything about a standard. I don&#x27;t mean that &quot;there isn&#x27;t an agreed upon notation that Deaf Americans use to write ASL&quot;, I mean &quot;we don&#x27;t have a good way represent signs that allows us to search with that representation, apply phonological rules, and synthesize signs from that representation&quot;.<p>We have all sorts of representations for spoken speech---a waveform, spectrogram, vocal tract models, IPA--and these all get used in a speech recognition (or synthesis) system. For ASL we have movies, still-image cartoons that depict motion, categories for some parameters like handshape, some linguistic insights, and I&#x27;m not sure what else.