This paper describes work towards designing a computer vision system for helping users look up the meaning of a sign. Sign lookup is treated as a video database retrieval problem. A video database is utilized that contains one or more video examples for each sign, for a large number of signs (close to 1000 in our current experiments). The emphasis of this paper is on evaluating the tradeoffs between a non-automated approach, where the user manually specifies hand locations in the input video, and a fully automated approach, where hand locations are determined using a computer vision module, thus introducing inaccuracies into the sign retrieval process. We experimentally evaluate both approaches and present their respective advantages and disadvantages. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.3.1 [Content Analysis and Indexing]: Indexing methods; H.2.8 [Database Applications]: Data Mining; H.2.4 [Systems]: Multimedia Databases Keywords American Sign Language recognition, ASL recognition,...