Linguistically Informed Transformers for Text to American Sign Language Translation

Abhishek Varanasi, Manjira Sinha, Tirthankar Dasgupta


Abstract
In this paper we propose a framework for automatic translation of English text to American Sign Language (ASL) which leverages a linguistically informed transformer model to translate English sentences into ASL gloss sequences. These glosses are then associated with respective ASL videos, effectively representing English text in ASL. To facilitate experimentation, we create an English-ASL parallel dataset on banking domain.Our preliminary results demonstrated that the linguistically informed transformer model achieves a 97.83% ROUGE-L score for text-to-gloss translation on the ASLG-PC12 dataset. Furthermore, fine-tuning the transformer model on the banking domain dataset yields an 89.47% ROUGE-L score when fine-tuned on ASLG-PC12 + banking domain dataset. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of the linguistically informed model for both general and domain-specific translations. To facilitate parallel dataset generation in banking-domain, we choose ASL despite having limited benchmarks and data corpus compared to some of the other sign languages.
Anthology ID:
2024.loresmt-1.5
Volume:
Proceedings of the The Seventh Workshop on Technologies for Machine Translation of Low-Resource Languages (LoResMT 2024)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Atul Kr. Ojha, Chao-hong Liu, Ekaterina Vylomova, Flammie Pirinen, Jade Abbott, Jonathan Washington, Nathaniel Oco, Valentin Malykh, Varvara Logacheva, Xiaobing Zhao
Venues:
LoResMT | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
50–56
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.loresmt-1.5
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Abhishek Varanasi, Manjira Sinha, and Tirthankar Dasgupta. 2024. Linguistically Informed Transformers for Text to American Sign Language Translation. In Proceedings of the The Seventh Workshop on Technologies for Machine Translation of Low-Resource Languages (LoResMT 2024), pages 50–56, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Linguistically Informed Transformers for Text to American Sign Language Translation (Varanasi et al., LoResMT-WS 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.loresmt-1.5.pdf