@inproceedings{saunders-etal-2022-skeletal,
title = "Skeletal Graph Self-Attention: Embedding a Skeleton Inductive Bias into Sign Language Production",
author = {Saunders, Ben and
Camg{\"o}z, Necati Cihan and
Bowden, Richard},
editor = "Efthimiou, Eleni and
Fotinea, Stavroula-Evita and
Hanke, Thomas and
McDonald, John C. and
Shterionov, Dimitar and
Wolfe, Rosalee",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Sign Language Translation and Avatar Technology: The Junction of the Visual and the Textual: Challenges and Perspectives",
month = jun,
year = "2022",
address = "Marseille, France",
publisher = "European Language Resources Association",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2022.sltat-1.15",
pages = "95--102",
abstract = "Recent approaches to Sign Language Production (SLP) have adopted spoken language Neural Machine Translation (NMT) architectures, applied without sign-specific modifications. In addition, these works represent sign language as a sequence of skeleton pose vectors, projected to an abstract representation with no inherent skeletal structure. In this paper, we represent sign language sequences as a skeletal graph structure, with joints as nodes and both spatial and temporal connections as edges. To operate on this graphical structure, we propose Skeletal Graph Self-Attention (SGSA), a novel graphical attention layer that embeds a skeleton inductive bias into the SLP model. Retaining the skeletal feature representation throughout, we directly apply a spatio-temporal adjacency matrix into the self-attention formulation. This provides structure and context to each skeletal joint that is not possible when using a non-graphical abstract representation, enabling fluid and expressive sign language production. We evaluate our Skeletal Graph Self-Attention architecture on the challenging RWTH-PHOENIX-Weather-2014T (PHOENIX14T) dataset, achieving state-of-the-art back translation performance with an 8{\%} and 7{\%} improvement over competing methods for the dev and test sets.",
}
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<abstract>Recent approaches to Sign Language Production (SLP) have adopted spoken language Neural Machine Translation (NMT) architectures, applied without sign-specific modifications. In addition, these works represent sign language as a sequence of skeleton pose vectors, projected to an abstract representation with no inherent skeletal structure. In this paper, we represent sign language sequences as a skeletal graph structure, with joints as nodes and both spatial and temporal connections as edges. To operate on this graphical structure, we propose Skeletal Graph Self-Attention (SGSA), a novel graphical attention layer that embeds a skeleton inductive bias into the SLP model. Retaining the skeletal feature representation throughout, we directly apply a spatio-temporal adjacency matrix into the self-attention formulation. This provides structure and context to each skeletal joint that is not possible when using a non-graphical abstract representation, enabling fluid and expressive sign language production. We evaluate our Skeletal Graph Self-Attention architecture on the challenging RWTH-PHOENIX-Weather-2014T (PHOENIX14T) dataset, achieving state-of-the-art back translation performance with an 8% and 7% improvement over competing methods for the dev and test sets.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Skeletal Graph Self-Attention: Embedding a Skeleton Inductive Bias into Sign Language Production
%A Saunders, Ben
%A Camgöz, Necati Cihan
%A Bowden, Richard
%Y Efthimiou, Eleni
%Y Fotinea, Stavroula-Evita
%Y Hanke, Thomas
%Y McDonald, John C.
%Y Shterionov, Dimitar
%Y Wolfe, Rosalee
%S Proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Sign Language Translation and Avatar Technology: The Junction of the Visual and the Textual: Challenges and Perspectives
%D 2022
%8 June
%I European Language Resources Association
%C Marseille, France
%F saunders-etal-2022-skeletal
%X Recent approaches to Sign Language Production (SLP) have adopted spoken language Neural Machine Translation (NMT) architectures, applied without sign-specific modifications. In addition, these works represent sign language as a sequence of skeleton pose vectors, projected to an abstract representation with no inherent skeletal structure. In this paper, we represent sign language sequences as a skeletal graph structure, with joints as nodes and both spatial and temporal connections as edges. To operate on this graphical structure, we propose Skeletal Graph Self-Attention (SGSA), a novel graphical attention layer that embeds a skeleton inductive bias into the SLP model. Retaining the skeletal feature representation throughout, we directly apply a spatio-temporal adjacency matrix into the self-attention formulation. This provides structure and context to each skeletal joint that is not possible when using a non-graphical abstract representation, enabling fluid and expressive sign language production. We evaluate our Skeletal Graph Self-Attention architecture on the challenging RWTH-PHOENIX-Weather-2014T (PHOENIX14T) dataset, achieving state-of-the-art back translation performance with an 8% and 7% improvement over competing methods for the dev and test sets.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2022.sltat-1.15
%P 95-102
Markdown (Informal)
[Skeletal Graph Self-Attention: Embedding a Skeleton Inductive Bias into Sign Language Production](https://aclanthology.org/2022.sltat-1.15) (Saunders et al., SLTAT 2022)
ACL