Including Signed Languages in Natural Language Processing

Kayo Yin, Amit Moryossef, Julie Hochgesang, Yoav Goldberg, Malihe Alikhani


Abstract
Signed languages are the primary means of communication for many deaf and hard of hearing individuals. Since signed languages exhibit all the fundamental linguistic properties of natural language, we believe that tools and theories of Natural Language Processing (NLP) are crucial towards its modeling. However, existing research in Sign Language Processing (SLP) seldom attempt to explore and leverage the linguistic organization of signed languages. This position paper calls on the NLP community to include signed languages as a research area with high social and scientific impact. We first discuss the linguistic properties of signed languages to consider during their modeling. Then, we review the limitations of current SLP models and identify the open challenges to extend NLP to signed languages. Finally, we urge (1) the adoption of an efficient tokenization method; (2) the development of linguistically-informed models; (3) the collection of real-world signed language data; (4) the inclusion of local signed language communities as an active and leading voice in the direction of research.
Anthology ID:
2021.acl-long.570
Volume:
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Chengqing Zong, Fei Xia, Wenjie Li, Roberto Navigli
Venues:
ACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7347–7360
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.570
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.570
Award:
 Best Theme Paper
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kayo Yin, Amit Moryossef, Julie Hochgesang, Yoav Goldberg, and Malihe Alikhani. 2021. Including Signed Languages in Natural Language Processing. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 7347–7360, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Including Signed Languages in Natural Language Processing (Yin et al., ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.570.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.570.mp4
Data
RWTH-PHOENIX-Weather 2014 T