@inproceedings{tu-weng-2026-fea,
title = "{FEA}-{SLT}: A Gloss-Free End-to-End Framework for Facial-Expression-Aware Sign Language Translation",
author = "Tu, Guobin and
Weng, Di",
editor = "Lee, Hung-Yi and
Dev, Sunipa and
Li, Jessy and
Elliott, Desmond",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
month = oct,
year = "2026",
address = "Budapest, Hungary",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.1999/",
pages = "45546--45570",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-459-0",
abstract = "Sign Language Translation (SLT) is a challenging cross-modal task requiring joint modeling of manual articulations and non-manual signals. Existing gloss-free SLT methods effectively capture gestural dynamics but often underutilize facial expressions, which play crucial grammatical and disambiguating roles. This limitation can cause semantic degradation when distinct concepts share similar manual configurations. To address this issue, we propose FEA-SLT (**F**acial-**E**xpression-**A**ware **S**ign **L**anguage **T**ranslation), a gloss-free end-to-end framework that uses facial dynamics to provide complementary cues to manual signals. FEA-SLT employs a domain-transferred facial encoder to extract expression-sensitive representations and integrates them with manual features through a linguistically motivated *Facial-Expression-Aware Fusion* (FEAF) module. FEAF captures reciprocal dependencies between manual and facial channels via bidirectional modulation, enhancing syntactic fidelity. Experiments on PHOENIX14T and CSL-Daily show that FEA-SLT achieves state-of-the-art BLEU performance among gloss-free methods, while targeted analyses support improved translation of facial-sensitive utterances. Code is available at https://github.com/TuGuobin/FEA-SLT."
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<abstract>Sign Language Translation (SLT) is a challenging cross-modal task requiring joint modeling of manual articulations and non-manual signals. Existing gloss-free SLT methods effectively capture gestural dynamics but often underutilize facial expressions, which play crucial grammatical and disambiguating roles. This limitation can cause semantic degradation when distinct concepts share similar manual configurations. To address this issue, we propose FEA-SLT (**F**acial-**E**xpression-**A**ware **S**ign **L**anguage **T**ranslation), a gloss-free end-to-end framework that uses facial dynamics to provide complementary cues to manual signals. FEA-SLT employs a domain-transferred facial encoder to extract expression-sensitive representations and integrates them with manual features through a linguistically motivated *Facial-Expression-Aware Fusion* (FEAF) module. FEAF captures reciprocal dependencies between manual and facial channels via bidirectional modulation, enhancing syntactic fidelity. Experiments on PHOENIX14T and CSL-Daily show that FEA-SLT achieves state-of-the-art BLEU performance among gloss-free methods, while targeted analyses support improved translation of facial-sensitive utterances. Code is available at https://github.com/TuGuobin/FEA-SLT.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T FEA-SLT: A Gloss-Free End-to-End Framework for Facial-Expression-Aware Sign Language Translation
%A Tu, Guobin
%A Weng, Di
%Y Lee, Hung-Yi
%Y Dev, Sunipa
%Y Li, Jessy
%Y Elliott, Desmond
%S Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
%D 2026
%8 October
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Budapest, Hungary
%@ 979-8-89176-459-0
%F tu-weng-2026-fea
%X Sign Language Translation (SLT) is a challenging cross-modal task requiring joint modeling of manual articulations and non-manual signals. Existing gloss-free SLT methods effectively capture gestural dynamics but often underutilize facial expressions, which play crucial grammatical and disambiguating roles. This limitation can cause semantic degradation when distinct concepts share similar manual configurations. To address this issue, we propose FEA-SLT (**F**acial-**E**xpression-**A**ware **S**ign **L**anguage **T**ranslation), a gloss-free end-to-end framework that uses facial dynamics to provide complementary cues to manual signals. FEA-SLT employs a domain-transferred facial encoder to extract expression-sensitive representations and integrates them with manual features through a linguistically motivated *Facial-Expression-Aware Fusion* (FEAF) module. FEAF captures reciprocal dependencies between manual and facial channels via bidirectional modulation, enhancing syntactic fidelity. Experiments on PHOENIX14T and CSL-Daily show that FEA-SLT achieves state-of-the-art BLEU performance among gloss-free methods, while targeted analyses support improved translation of facial-sensitive utterances. Code is available at https://github.com/TuGuobin/FEA-SLT.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.1999/
%P 45546-45570
Markdown (Informal)
[FEA-SLT: A Gloss-Free End-to-End Framework for Facial-Expression-Aware Sign Language Translation](https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.1999/) (Tu & Weng, EMNLP 2026)
ACL