Bootstrapping Sign Language Annotations with Sign Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Lea, Colin, Baltatzis, Vasileios, Gillis, Connor, Kushalnagar, Raja, Quandt, Lorna, Findlater, Leah
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Lea, Colin
Baltatzis, Vasileios
Gillis, Connor
Kushalnagar, Raja
Quandt, Lorna
Findlater, Leah
author_facet Lea, Colin
Baltatzis, Vasileios
Gillis, Connor
Kushalnagar, Raja
Quandt, Lorna
Findlater, Leah
contents AI-driven sign language interpretation is limited by a lack of high-quality annotated data. New datasets including ASL STEM Wiki and FLEURS-ASL contain professional interpreters and 100s of hours of data but remain only partially annotated and thus underutilized, in part due to the prohibitive costs of annotating at this scale. In this work, we develop a pseudo-annotation pipeline that takes signed video and English as input and outputs a ranked set of likely annotations, including time intervals, for glosses, fingerspelled words, and sign classifiers. Our pipeline uses sparse predictions from our fingerspelling recognizer and isolated sign recognizer (ISR), along with a K-Shot LLM approach, to estimate these annotations. In service of this pipeline, we establish simple yet effective baseline fingerspelling and ISR models, achieving state-of-the-art on FSBoard (6.7% CER) and on ASL Citizen datasets (74% top-1 accuracy). To validate and provide a gold-standard benchmark, a professional interpreter annotated nearly 500 videos from ASL STEM Wiki with sequence-level gloss labels containing glosses, classifiers, and fingerspelling signs. These human annotations and over 300 hours of pseudo-annotations are being released in supplemental material.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_07606
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Bootstrapping Sign Language Annotations with Sign Language Models
Lea, Colin
Baltatzis, Vasileios
Gillis, Connor
Kushalnagar, Raja
Quandt, Lorna
Findlater, Leah
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
AI-driven sign language interpretation is limited by a lack of high-quality annotated data. New datasets including ASL STEM Wiki and FLEURS-ASL contain professional interpreters and 100s of hours of data but remain only partially annotated and thus underutilized, in part due to the prohibitive costs of annotating at this scale. In this work, we develop a pseudo-annotation pipeline that takes signed video and English as input and outputs a ranked set of likely annotations, including time intervals, for glosses, fingerspelled words, and sign classifiers. Our pipeline uses sparse predictions from our fingerspelling recognizer and isolated sign recognizer (ISR), along with a K-Shot LLM approach, to estimate these annotations. In service of this pipeline, we establish simple yet effective baseline fingerspelling and ISR models, achieving state-of-the-art on FSBoard (6.7% CER) and on ASL Citizen datasets (74% top-1 accuracy). To validate and provide a gold-standard benchmark, a professional interpreter annotated nearly 500 videos from ASL STEM Wiki with sequence-level gloss labels containing glosses, classifiers, and fingerspelling signs. These human annotations and over 300 hours of pseudo-annotations are being released in supplemental material.
title Bootstrapping Sign Language Annotations with Sign Language Models
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.07606