@inproceedings{yazdani-etal-2025-seeing,
title = "Seeing, Signing, and Saying: A Vision-Language Model-Assisted Pipeline for Sign Language Data Acquisition and Curation from Social Media",
author = "Yazdani, Shakib and
Hamidullah, Yasser and
Espa{\~n}a-Bonet, Cristina and
van Genabith, Josef",
editor = "Angelova, Galia and
Kunilovskaya, Maria and
Escribe, Marie and
Mitkov, Ruslan",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing - Natural Language Processing in the Generative AI Era",
month = sep,
year = "2025",
address = "Varna, Bulgaria",
publisher = "INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.ranlp-1.159/",
pages = "1374--1384",
abstract = "Most existing sign language translation (SLT) datasets are limited in scale, lack multilingual coverage, and are costly to curate due to their reliance on expert annotation and controlled recording setup. Recently, Vision Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities as evaluators and real-time assistants. Despite these advancements, their potential remains untapped in the context of sign language dataset acquisition. To bridge this gap, we introduce the first automated annotation and filtering framework that utilizes VLMs to reduce reliance on manual effort while preserving data quality. Our method is applied to TikTok videos across eight sign languages and to the already curated YouTube-SL-25 dataset in German Sign Language for the purpose of additional evaluation. Our VLM-based pipeline includes a face visibility detection, a sign activity recognition, a text extraction from video content, and a judgment step to validate alignment between video and text, implementing generic filtering, annotation and validation steps. Using the resulting corpus, TikTok-SL-8, we assess the performance of two off-the-shelf SLT models on our filtered dataset for German and American Sign Languages, with the goal of establishing baselines and evaluating the robustness of recent models on automatically extracted, slightly noisy data. Our work enables scalable, weakly supervised pretraining for SLT and facilitates data acquisition from social media."
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<abstract>Most existing sign language translation (SLT) datasets are limited in scale, lack multilingual coverage, and are costly to curate due to their reliance on expert annotation and controlled recording setup. Recently, Vision Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities as evaluators and real-time assistants. Despite these advancements, their potential remains untapped in the context of sign language dataset acquisition. To bridge this gap, we introduce the first automated annotation and filtering framework that utilizes VLMs to reduce reliance on manual effort while preserving data quality. Our method is applied to TikTok videos across eight sign languages and to the already curated YouTube-SL-25 dataset in German Sign Language for the purpose of additional evaluation. Our VLM-based pipeline includes a face visibility detection, a sign activity recognition, a text extraction from video content, and a judgment step to validate alignment between video and text, implementing generic filtering, annotation and validation steps. Using the resulting corpus, TikTok-SL-8, we assess the performance of two off-the-shelf SLT models on our filtered dataset for German and American Sign Languages, with the goal of establishing baselines and evaluating the robustness of recent models on automatically extracted, slightly noisy data. Our work enables scalable, weakly supervised pretraining for SLT and facilitates data acquisition from social media.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Seeing, Signing, and Saying: A Vision-Language Model-Assisted Pipeline for Sign Language Data Acquisition and Curation from Social Media
%A Yazdani, Shakib
%A Hamidullah, Yasser
%A España-Bonet, Cristina
%A van Genabith, Josef
%Y Angelova, Galia
%Y Kunilovskaya, Maria
%Y Escribe, Marie
%Y Mitkov, Ruslan
%S Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing - Natural Language Processing in the Generative AI Era
%D 2025
%8 September
%I INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria
%C Varna, Bulgaria
%F yazdani-etal-2025-seeing
%X Most existing sign language translation (SLT) datasets are limited in scale, lack multilingual coverage, and are costly to curate due to their reliance on expert annotation and controlled recording setup. Recently, Vision Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities as evaluators and real-time assistants. Despite these advancements, their potential remains untapped in the context of sign language dataset acquisition. To bridge this gap, we introduce the first automated annotation and filtering framework that utilizes VLMs to reduce reliance on manual effort while preserving data quality. Our method is applied to TikTok videos across eight sign languages and to the already curated YouTube-SL-25 dataset in German Sign Language for the purpose of additional evaluation. Our VLM-based pipeline includes a face visibility detection, a sign activity recognition, a text extraction from video content, and a judgment step to validate alignment between video and text, implementing generic filtering, annotation and validation steps. Using the resulting corpus, TikTok-SL-8, we assess the performance of two off-the-shelf SLT models on our filtered dataset for German and American Sign Languages, with the goal of establishing baselines and evaluating the robustness of recent models on automatically extracted, slightly noisy data. Our work enables scalable, weakly supervised pretraining for SLT and facilitates data acquisition from social media.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2025.ranlp-1.159/
%P 1374-1384
Markdown (Informal)
[Seeing, Signing, and Saying: A Vision-Language Model-Assisted Pipeline for Sign Language Data Acquisition and Curation from Social Media](https://aclanthology.org/2025.ranlp-1.159/) (Yazdani et al., RANLP 2025)
ACL
- Shakib Yazdani, Yasser Hamidullah, Cristina España-Bonet, and Josef van Genabith. 2025. Seeing, Signing, and Saying: A Vision-Language Model-Assisted Pipeline for Sign Language Data Acquisition and Curation from Social Media. In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing - Natural Language Processing in the Generative AI Era, pages 1374–1384, Varna, Bulgaria. INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria.