ADAT: Time-Series-Aware Adaptive Transformer Architecture for Sign Language Translation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Shahin, Nada, Ismail, Leila
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Shahin, Nada
Ismail, Leila
author_facet Shahin, Nada
Ismail, Leila
contents Current sign language machine translation systems rely on recognizing hand movements, facial expressions and body postures, and natural language processing, to convert signs into text. Recent approaches use Transformer architectures to model long-range dependencies via positional encoding. However, they lack accuracy in recognizing fine-grained, short-range temporal dependencies between gestures captured at high frame rates. Moreover, their high computational complexity leads to inefficient training. To mitigate these issues, we propose an Adaptive Transformer (ADAT), which incorporates components for enhanced feature extraction and adaptive feature weighting through a gating mechanism to emphasize contextually relevant features while reducing training overhead and maintaining translation accuracy. To evaluate ADAT, we introduce MedASL, the first public medical American Sign Language dataset. In sign-to-gloss-to-text experiments, ADAT outperforms the encoder-decoder transformer, improving BLEU-4 accuracy by 0.1% while reducing training time by 14.33% on PHOENIX14T and 3.24% on MedASL. In sign-to-text experiments, it improves accuracy by 8.7% and reduces training time by 2.8% on PHOENIX14T and achieves 4.7% higher accuracy and 7.17% faster training on MedASL. Compared to encoder-only and decoder-only baselines in sign-to-text, ADAT is at least 6.8% more accurate despite being up to 12.1% slower due to its dual-stream structure.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_11942
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ADAT: Time-Series-Aware Adaptive Transformer Architecture for Sign Language Translation
Shahin, Nada
Ismail, Leila
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
I.2.6; I.2.7; I.2.10; I.4.8; I.4.9; I.4.10
Current sign language machine translation systems rely on recognizing hand movements, facial expressions and body postures, and natural language processing, to convert signs into text. Recent approaches use Transformer architectures to model long-range dependencies via positional encoding. However, they lack accuracy in recognizing fine-grained, short-range temporal dependencies between gestures captured at high frame rates. Moreover, their high computational complexity leads to inefficient training. To mitigate these issues, we propose an Adaptive Transformer (ADAT), which incorporates components for enhanced feature extraction and adaptive feature weighting through a gating mechanism to emphasize contextually relevant features while reducing training overhead and maintaining translation accuracy. To evaluate ADAT, we introduce MedASL, the first public medical American Sign Language dataset. In sign-to-gloss-to-text experiments, ADAT outperforms the encoder-decoder transformer, improving BLEU-4 accuracy by 0.1% while reducing training time by 14.33% on PHOENIX14T and 3.24% on MedASL. In sign-to-text experiments, it improves accuracy by 8.7% and reduces training time by 2.8% on PHOENIX14T and achieves 4.7% higher accuracy and 7.17% faster training on MedASL. Compared to encoder-only and decoder-only baselines in sign-to-text, ADAT is at least 6.8% more accurate despite being up to 12.1% slower due to its dual-stream structure.
title ADAT: Time-Series-Aware Adaptive Transformer Architecture for Sign Language Translation
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
I.2.6; I.2.7; I.2.10; I.4.8; I.4.9; I.4.10
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.11942