EmoSign: A Multimodal Dataset for Understanding Emotions in American Sign Language

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Chua, Phoebe, Fang, Cathy Mengying, Ohkawa, Takehiko, Kushalnagar, Raja, Nanayakkara, Suranga, Maes, Pattie
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Chua, Phoebe
Fang, Cathy Mengying
Ohkawa, Takehiko
Kushalnagar, Raja
Nanayakkara, Suranga
Maes, Pattie
author_facet Chua, Phoebe
Fang, Cathy Mengying
Ohkawa, Takehiko
Kushalnagar, Raja
Nanayakkara, Suranga
Maes, Pattie
contents Unlike spoken languages where the use of prosodic features to convey emotion is well studied, indicators of emotion in sign language remain poorly understood, creating communication barriers in critical settings. Sign languages present unique challenges as facial expressions and hand movements simultaneously serve both grammatical and emotional functions. To address this gap, we introduce EmoSign, the first sign video dataset containing sentiment and emotion labels for 200 American Sign Language (ASL) videos. We also collect open-ended descriptions of emotion cues. Annotations were done by 3 Deaf ASL signers with professional interpretation experience. Alongside the annotations, we include baseline models for sentiment and emotion classification. This dataset not only addresses a critical gap in existing sign language research but also establishes a new benchmark for understanding model capabilities in multimodal emotion recognition for sign languages. The dataset is made available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/catfang/emosign.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_17090
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle EmoSign: A Multimodal Dataset for Understanding Emotions in American Sign Language
Chua, Phoebe
Fang, Cathy Mengying
Ohkawa, Takehiko
Kushalnagar, Raja
Nanayakkara, Suranga
Maes, Pattie
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Unlike spoken languages where the use of prosodic features to convey emotion is well studied, indicators of emotion in sign language remain poorly understood, creating communication barriers in critical settings. Sign languages present unique challenges as facial expressions and hand movements simultaneously serve both grammatical and emotional functions. To address this gap, we introduce EmoSign, the first sign video dataset containing sentiment and emotion labels for 200 American Sign Language (ASL) videos. We also collect open-ended descriptions of emotion cues. Annotations were done by 3 Deaf ASL signers with professional interpretation experience. Alongside the annotations, we include baseline models for sentiment and emotion classification. This dataset not only addresses a critical gap in existing sign language research but also establishes a new benchmark for understanding model capabilities in multimodal emotion recognition for sign languages. The dataset is made available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/catfang/emosign.
title EmoSign: A Multimodal Dataset for Understanding Emotions in American Sign Language
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.17090