FLEURS-ASL: Including American Sign Language in Massively Multilingual Multitask Evaluation

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 Sign language translation has historically been peripheral to mainstream machine translation research. In order to help converge the fields, we introduce FLEURS-ASL, an extension of the multiway parallel benchmarks FLORES (for text) and FLEURS (for speech) to support their first sign language (as video), American Sign Language, translated by 5 Certified Deaf Interpreters. FLEURS-ASL can be used to evaluate a variety of tasks -- primarily sentence- and discourse-level translation -- between ASL and 200 other languages as text, or 102 languages as speech. We provide baselines for tasks from ASL to English text using a unified modeling approach that incorporates timestamp tokens and previous text tokens in a 34-second context window, trained on random video clips from YouTube-ASL. This model meets or exceeds the performance of phrase-level baselines while supporting a multitude of new tasks. We also use FLEURS-ASL to show that multimodal frontier models have virtually no understanding of ASL, underscoring the importance of including sign languages in standard evaluation suites.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2408_13585
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle FLEURS-ASL: Including American Sign Language in Massively Multilingual Multitask Evaluation
Tanzer, Garrett
Computation and Language
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Sign language translation has historically been peripheral to mainstream machine translation research. In order to help converge the fields, we introduce FLEURS-ASL, an extension of the multiway parallel benchmarks FLORES (for text) and FLEURS (for speech) to support their first sign language (as video), American Sign Language, translated by 5 Certified Deaf Interpreters. FLEURS-ASL can be used to evaluate a variety of tasks -- primarily sentence- and discourse-level translation -- between ASL and 200 other languages as text, or 102 languages as speech. We provide baselines for tasks from ASL to English text using a unified modeling approach that incorporates timestamp tokens and previous text tokens in a 34-second context window, trained on random video clips from YouTube-ASL. This model meets or exceeds the performance of phrase-level baselines while supporting a multitude of new tasks. We also use FLEURS-ASL to show that multimodal frontier models have virtually no understanding of ASL, underscoring the importance of including sign languages in standard evaluation suites.
title FLEURS-ASL: Including American Sign Language in Massively Multilingual Multitask Evaluation
topic Computation and Language
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.13585