JWSign: A Highly Multilingual Corpus of Bible Translations for more Diversity in Sign Language Processing

Shester Gueuwou, Sophie Siake, Colin Leong, Mathias Müller


Abstract
Advancements in sign language processing have been hindered by a lack of sufficient data, impeding progress in recognition, translation, and production tasks. The absence of comprehensive sign language datasets across the world’s sign languages has widened the gap in this field, resulting in a few sign languages being studied more than others, making this research area extremely skewed mostly towards sign languages from high-income countries. In this work we introduce a new large and highly multilingual dataset for sign language translation: JWSign. The dataset consists of 2,530 hours of Bible translations in 98 sign languages, featuring more than 1,500 individual signers. On this dataset, we report neural machine translation experiments. Apart from bilingual baseline systems, we also train multilingual systems, including some that take into account the typological relatedness of signed or spoken languages. Our experiments highlight that multilingual systems are superior to bilingual baselines, and that in higher-resource scenarios, clustering language pairs that are related improves translation quality.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.664
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
9907–9927
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.664
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.664
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shester Gueuwou, Sophie Siake, Colin Leong, and Mathias Müller. 2023. JWSign: A Highly Multilingual Corpus of Bible Translations for more Diversity in Sign Language Processing. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 9907–9927, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
JWSign: A Highly Multilingual Corpus of Bible Translations for more Diversity in Sign Language Processing (Gueuwou et al., Findings 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.664.pdf