Gloss-Free End-to-End Sign Language Translation

Kezhou Lin, Xiaohan Wang, Linchao Zhu, Ke Sun, Bang Zhang, Yi Yang


Abstract
In this paper, we tackle the problem of sign language translation (SLT) without gloss annotations. Although intermediate representation like gloss has been proven effective, gloss annotations are hard to acquire, especially in large quantities. This limits the domain coverage of translation datasets, thus handicapping real-world applications. To mitigate this problem, we design the Gloss-Free End-to-end sign language translation framework (GloFE). Our method improves the performance of SLT in the gloss-free setting by exploiting the shared underlying semantics of signs and the corresponding spoken translation. Common concepts are extracted from the text and used as a weak form of intermediate representation. The global embedding of these concepts is used as a query for cross-attention to find the corresponding information within the learned visual features. In a contrastive manner, we encourage the similarity of query results between samples containing such concepts and decrease those that do not. We obtained state-of-the-art results on large-scale datasets, including OpenASL and How2Sign.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.722
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
12904–12916
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.722
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.722
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kezhou Lin, Xiaohan Wang, Linchao Zhu, Ke Sun, Bang Zhang, and Yi Yang. 2023. Gloss-Free End-to-End Sign Language Translation. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 12904–12916, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Gloss-Free End-to-End Sign Language Translation (Lin et al., ACL 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.722.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.722.mp4