Fingerspelling within Sign Language Translation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Author: Tanzer, Garrett
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Tanzer, Garrett
author_facet Tanzer, Garrett
contents Fingerspelling poses challenges for sign language processing due to its high-frequency motion and use for open-vocabulary terms. While prior work has studied fingerspelling recognition, there has been little attention to evaluating how well sign language translation models understand fingerspelling in the context of entire sentences -- and improving this capability. We manually annotate instances of fingerspelling within FLEURS-ASL and use them to evaluate the effect of two simple measures to improve fingerspelling recognition within American Sign Language to English translation: 1) use a model family (ByT5) with character- rather than subword-level tokenization, and 2) mix fingerspelling recognition data into the translation training mixture. We find that 1) substantially improves understanding of fingerspelling (and therefore translation quality overall), but the effect of 2) is mixed.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2408_07065
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Fingerspelling within Sign Language Translation
Tanzer, Garrett
Computation and Language
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Fingerspelling poses challenges for sign language processing due to its high-frequency motion and use for open-vocabulary terms. While prior work has studied fingerspelling recognition, there has been little attention to evaluating how well sign language translation models understand fingerspelling in the context of entire sentences -- and improving this capability. We manually annotate instances of fingerspelling within FLEURS-ASL and use them to evaluate the effect of two simple measures to improve fingerspelling recognition within American Sign Language to English translation: 1) use a model family (ByT5) with character- rather than subword-level tokenization, and 2) mix fingerspelling recognition data into the translation training mixture. We find that 1) substantially improves understanding of fingerspelling (and therefore translation quality overall), but the effect of 2) is mixed.
title Fingerspelling within Sign Language Translation
topic Computation and Language
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.07065