iSign: A Benchmark for Indian Sign Language Processing

Abhinav Joshi, Romit Mohanty, Mounika Kanakanti, Andesha Mangla, Sudeep Choudhary, Monali Barbate, Ashutosh Modi


Abstract
Indian Sign Language has limited resources for developing machine learning and data-driven approaches for automated language processing. Though text/audio-based language processing techniques have shown colossal research interest and tremendous improvements in the last few years, Sign Languages still need to catch up due to the need for more resources. To bridge this gap, in this work, we propose iSign: a benchmark for Indian Sign Language (ISL) Processing. We make three primary contributions to this work. First, we release one of the largest ISL-English datasets with more than video-sentence/phrase pairs. To the best of our knowledge, it is the largest sign language dataset available for ISL. Second, we propose multiple NLP-specific tasks (including SignVideo2Text, SignPose2Text, Text2Pose, Word Prediction, and Sign Semantics) and benchmark them with the baseline models for easier access to the research community. Third, we provide detailed insights into the proposed benchmarks with a few linguistic insights into the working of ISL. We streamline the evaluation of Sign Language processing, addressing the gaps in the NLP research community for Sign Languages. We release the dataset, tasks and models via the following website: https://exploration-lab.github.io/iSign/
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.643
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
10827–10844
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.643
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Abhinav Joshi, Romit Mohanty, Mounika Kanakanti, Andesha Mangla, Sudeep Choudhary, Monali Barbate, and Ashutosh Modi. 2024. iSign: A Benchmark for Indian Sign Language Processing. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024, pages 10827–10844, Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
iSign: A Benchmark for Indian Sign Language Processing (Joshi et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.643.pdf