Sign Language Translation (SLT) first uses a Sign Language Recognition (SLR) system to extract sign language glosses from videos. Then, a translation system generates spoken language translations from the sign language glosses. This paper focuses on the translation system and introduces the STMC-Transformer which improves on the current state-of-the-art by over 5 and 7 BLEU respectively on gloss-to-text and video-to-text translation of the PHOENIX-Weather 2014T dataset. On the ASLG-PC12 corpus, we report an increase of over 16 BLEU.
We also demonstrate the problem in current methods that rely on gloss supervision. The video-to-text translation of our STMC-Transformer outperforms translation of GT glosses. This contradicts previous claims that GT gloss translation acts as an upper bound for SLT performance and reveals that glosses are an inefficient representation of sign language. For future SLT research, we therefore suggest an end-to-end training of the recognition and translation models, or using a different sign language annotation scheme.
Prior work on Sign Language Translation has shown that having a mid-level sign gloss representation (effectively recognizing the individual signs) improves the translation performance drastically. In fact, the current state-of-the-art in translation requires gloss level tokenization in order to work. We introduce a novel transformer based architecture that jointly learns Continuous Sign Language Recognition and Translation while being trainable in an end-to-end manner. This is achieved by using a Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) loss to bind the recognition and translation problems …
From Rule-Based Models to Deep Learning Transformers Architectures for Natural Language Processing and Sign Language Translation Systems: Survey, Taxonomy and Performance Evaluation
United Arab Emirates University（阿联酋大学）；Emirates Center for Mobility Research（阿联酋移动性研究中心）
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center（合肥综合性国家科学中心）
Despite existing pioneering works on sign language translation (SLT), there is a non-trivial obstacle, i.e., the limited quantity of parallel sign-text data. To tackle this parallel data bottleneck, we propose a sign back-translation (SignBT) approach, which incorporates massive spoken language texts into SLT training. With a text-to-gloss translation model, we first back-translate the monolingual text to its gloss sequence. Then, the paired sign sequence is generated by splicing pieces from an estimated gloss-to-sign bank at the feature level. Finally, the synthetic parallel data serves as a …
Existing work on sign language translation - that is, translation from sign language videos into sentences in a written language - has focused mainly on (1) data collected in a controlled environment or (2) data in a specific domain, which limits the applicability to real-world settings. In this paper, we introduce OpenASL, a large-scale American Sign Language (ASL) - English dataset collected from online video sites (e.g., YouTube). OpenASL contains 288 hours of ASL videos in multiple domains from over 200 signers and is the largest publicly available ASL translation dataset to date. To tackl…
Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya（加泰罗尼亚理工大学）；Barcelona Supercomputing Center（巴塞罗那超级计算中心）
This paper describes the system developed at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya for the Workshop on Machine Translation 2022 Sign Language Translation Task, in particular, for the sign-to-text direction. We use a Transformer model implemented with the Fairseq modeling toolkit. We have experimented with the vocabulary size, data augmentation techniques and pretraining the model with the PHOENIX-14T dataset. Our system obtains 0.50 BLEU score for the test set, improving the organizers' baseline by 0.38 BLEU. We remark the poor results for both the baseline and our system, and thus, the unr…
We outline a bidirectional translation system that converts sentences from American Sign Language (ASL) to English, and vice versa. To perform machine translation between ASL and English, we utilize a generative approach. Specifically, we employ an adjustment to the IBM word-alignment model 1 (IBM WAM1), where we define language models for English and ASL, as well as a translation model, and attempt to generate a translation that maximizes the posterior distribution defined by these models. Then, using these models, we are able to quantify the concepts of fluency and faithfulness of a translat…
Bar-Ilan University（巴伊兰大学）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Allen Institute for AI（艾伦人工智能研究所）
Sign language translation (SLT) is often decomposed into video-to-gloss recognition and gloss-to-text translation, where a gloss is a sequence of transcribed spoken-language words in the order in which they are signed. We focus here on gloss-to-text translation, which we treat as a low-resource neural machine translation (NMT) problem. However, unlike traditional low-resource NMT, gloss-to-text translation differs because gloss-text pairs often have a higher lexical overlap and lower syntactic overlap than pairs of spoken languages. We exploit this lexical overlap and handle syntactic divergen…
This article presents an original method for Text-to-Sign Translation. It compensates data scarcity using a domain-specific parallel corpus of alignments between text and hierarchical formal descriptions of Sign Language videos in AZee. Based on the detection of similarities present in the source text, the proposed algorithm recursively exploits matches and substitutions of aligned segments to build multiple candidate translations for a novel statement. This helps preserving Sign Language structures as much as possible before falling back on literal translations too quickly, in a generative wa…
University of Zurich（苏黎世大学）；ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Bar-Ilan University（巴伊兰大学）
Automatic sign language processing is gaining popularity in Natural Language Processing (NLP) research (Yin et al., 2021). In machine translation (MT) in particular, sign language translation based on glosses is a prominent approach. In this paper, we review recent works on neural gloss translation. We find that limitations of glosses in general and limitations of specific datasets are not discussed in a transparent manner and that there is no common standard for evaluation. To address these issues, we put forward concrete recommendations for future research on gloss translation. Our suggestio…
University of Zurich（苏黎世大学）；Bar-Ilan University（巴伊兰大学）
This paper presents work on novel machine translation (MT) systems between spoken and signed languages, where signed languages are represented in SignWriting, a sign language writing system. Our work seeks to address the lack of out-of-the-box support for signed languages in current MT systems and is based on the SignBank dataset, which contains pairs of spoken language text and SignWriting content. We introduce novel methods to parse, factorize, decode, and evaluate SignWriting, leveraging ideas from neural factored MT. In a bilingual setup--translating from American Sign Language to (America…
Research Lab. UTIC, University of Tunis（突尼斯大学UTIC研究实验室）
This works aims to design a statistical machine translation from English text to American Sign Language (ASL). The system is based on Moses tool with some modifications and the results are synthesized through a 3D avatar for interpretation. First, we translate the input text to gloss, a written form of ASL. Second, we pass the output to the WebSign Plug-in to play the sign. Contributions of this work are the use of a new couple of language English/ASL and an improvement of statistical machine translation based on string matching thanks to Jaro-distance.
University of Surrey（萨里大学）；Fincons Group（Fincons集团）；SWISSTXT
Computational sign language research lacks the large-scale datasets that enables the creation of useful reallife applications. To date, most research has been limited to prototype systems on small domains of discourse, e.g. weather forecasts. To address this issue and to push the field forward, we release six datasets comprised of 190 hours of footage on the larger domain of news. From this, 20 hours of footage have been annotated by Deaf experts and interpreters and is made publicly available for research purposes. In this paper, we share the dataset collection process and tools developed to …
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）
Sign language gloss translation aims to translate the sign glosses into spoken language texts, which is challenging due to the scarcity of labeled gloss-text parallel data. Back translation (BT), which generates pseudo-parallel data by translating in-domain spoken language texts into sign glosses, has been applied to alleviate the data scarcity problem. However, the lack of large-scale high-quality domain spoken language text data limits the effect of BT. In this paper, to overcome the limitation, we propose a Prompt based domain text Generation (PGEN) approach to produce the large-scale in-do…
Enhancing Document-level Translation of Large Language Model via Translation Mixed-instructions
The Key Laboratory of Linguistic and Cultural Computing of Ministry of Education（教育部语言与文化计算重点实验室）；Institute of Artificial Intelligence（人工智能研究所）；Northwest Minzu University（西北民族大学）；Soochow University（苏州大学）
This paper describes Microsoft's submission to the first shared task on sign language translation at WMT 2022, a public competition tackling sign language to spoken language translation for Swiss German sign language. The task is very challenging due to data scarcity and an unprecedented vocabulary size of more than 20k words on the target side. Moreover, the data is taken from real broadcast news, includes native signing and covers scenarios of long videos. Motivated by recent advances in action recognition, we incorporate full body information by extracting features from a pre-trained I3D mo…
IBM Research（IBM研究院）；University of Haifa（海法大学）；The Arab College for Education（阿拉伯教育学院）
Translation has played an important role in trade, law, commerce, politics, and literature for thousands of years. Translators have always tried to be invisible; ideal translations should look as if they were written originally in the target language. We show that traces of the source language remain in the translation product to the extent that it is possible to uncover the history of the source language by looking only at the translation. Specifically, we automatically reconstruct phylogenetic language trees from monolingual texts (translated from several source languages). The signal of the…
Latent tree learning(LTL) methods learn to parse sentences using only indirect supervision from a downstream task. Recent advances in latent tree learning have made it possible to recover moderately high quality tree structures by training with language modeling or auto-encoding objectives. In this work, we explore the hypothesis that decoding in machine translation, as a conditional language modeling task, will produce better tree structures since it offers a similar training signal as language modeling, but with more semantic signal. We adapt two existing latent-tree language models--PRPN an…
Explore More Guidance: A Task-aware Instruction Network for Sign Language Translation Enhanced with Data Augmentation
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Nanchang University（南昌大学）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Zhejiang Lab（之江实验室）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen（香港中文大学（深圳））
SSL-SSAW: Self-Supervised Learning with Sigmoid Self-Attention Weighting for Question-Based Sign Language Translation
School of Computer Science and Technology, College of Intelligence and Computing, Tianjin University（计算机科学与技术学院，智能计算学院，天津大学）；School of Computer Science and Technology, Tiangong University（计算机科学与技术学院，天津工大大学）
