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Main Authors: Rahman, Kazi Mahathir, Nafis, Naveed Imtiaz, Sadik, Md. Farhan, Rafi, Mohammad Al, Shahed, Mehedi Hasan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.06530
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author Rahman, Kazi Mahathir
Nafis, Naveed Imtiaz
Sadik, Md. Farhan
Rafi, Mohammad Al
Shahed, Mehedi Hasan
author_facet Rahman, Kazi Mahathir
Nafis, Naveed Imtiaz
Sadik, Md. Farhan
Rafi, Mohammad Al
Shahed, Mehedi Hasan
contents Helping deaf and hard-of-hearing people communicate more easily is the main goal of Automatic Sign Language Translation. Although most past research has focused on turning sign language into text, doing the reverse, turning spoken English into sign language animations, has been largely overlooked. That's because it involves multiple steps, such as understanding speech, translating it into sign-friendly grammar, and generating natural human motion. In this work, we introduce a complete pipeline that converts English speech into smooth, realistic 3D sign language animations. Our system starts with Whisper to translate spoken English into text. Then, we use a MarianMT machine translation model to translate that text into American Sign Language (ASL) gloss, a simplified version of sign language that captures meaning without grammar. This model performs well, reaching BLEU scores of 0.7714 and 0.8923. To make the gloss translation more accurate, we also use word embeddings such as Word2Vec and FastText to understand word meanings. Finally, we animate the translated gloss using a 3D keypoint-based motion system trained on Sign3D-WLASL, a dataset we created by extracting body, hand, and face key points from real ASL videos in the WLASL dataset. To support the gloss translation stage, we also built a new dataset called BookGlossCorpus-CG, which turns everyday English sentences from the BookCorpus dataset into ASL gloss using grammar rules. Our system stitches everything together by smoothly interpolating between signs to create natural, continuous animations. Unlike previous works like How2Sign and Phoenix-2014T that focus on recognition or use only one type of data, our pipeline brings together audio, text, and motion in a single framework that goes all the way from spoken English to lifelike 3D sign language animation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_06530
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Speak2Sign3D: A Multi-modal Pipeline for English Speech to American Sign Language Animation
Rahman, Kazi Mahathir
Nafis, Naveed Imtiaz
Sadik, Md. Farhan
Rafi, Mohammad Al
Shahed, Mehedi Hasan
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Helping deaf and hard-of-hearing people communicate more easily is the main goal of Automatic Sign Language Translation. Although most past research has focused on turning sign language into text, doing the reverse, turning spoken English into sign language animations, has been largely overlooked. That's because it involves multiple steps, such as understanding speech, translating it into sign-friendly grammar, and generating natural human motion. In this work, we introduce a complete pipeline that converts English speech into smooth, realistic 3D sign language animations. Our system starts with Whisper to translate spoken English into text. Then, we use a MarianMT machine translation model to translate that text into American Sign Language (ASL) gloss, a simplified version of sign language that captures meaning without grammar. This model performs well, reaching BLEU scores of 0.7714 and 0.8923. To make the gloss translation more accurate, we also use word embeddings such as Word2Vec and FastText to understand word meanings. Finally, we animate the translated gloss using a 3D keypoint-based motion system trained on Sign3D-WLASL, a dataset we created by extracting body, hand, and face key points from real ASL videos in the WLASL dataset. To support the gloss translation stage, we also built a new dataset called BookGlossCorpus-CG, which turns everyday English sentences from the BookCorpus dataset into ASL gloss using grammar rules. Our system stitches everything together by smoothly interpolating between signs to create natural, continuous animations. Unlike previous works like How2Sign and Phoenix-2014T that focus on recognition or use only one type of data, our pipeline brings together audio, text, and motion in a single framework that goes all the way from spoken English to lifelike 3D sign language animation.
title Speak2Sign3D: A Multi-modal Pipeline for English Speech to American Sign Language Animation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.06530