Learning to Spot Signs from Named Entities. A study on French Sign Language.

Julie Halbout, Annelies Braffort, Michèle Gouiffès, Diandra Fabre, Julie Lascar


Abstract
French Sign Language (LSF) is a low-resourced language, with few available corpora, most of which being only partially annotated. Previous work on other sign languages has explored automatic sign annotation using subtitles as weak supervision, existing signaries, or mouthing cues. This paper focuses on the corpus Matignon-LSF, by first leveraging lexical token spotting then by studying Named Entities (locations, companies, persons). Accounting for the Named entities enables the automatic detection of 30% to 100% more signs per class and improves the spotting of rare signs. In addition, this work provides insights into the signing of named entities and contributes resources for improving LSF-to-French translation models.
Anthology ID:
2026.signlang-1.22
Volume:
Proceedings of the LREC 2026 12th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Language in Motion
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma, Mallorca (Spain)
Editors:
Eleni Efthimiou, Stavroula-Evita Fotinea, Thomas Hanke, Julie A. Hochgesang, Johanna Mesch, Marc Schulder
Venues:
SignLang | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
203–211
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-ws-signlang-22
DOI:
10.63317/26i8n4zuyzyx
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Julie Halbout, Annelies Braffort, Michèle Gouiffès, Diandra Fabre, and Julie Lascar. 2026. Learning to Spot Signs from Named Entities. A study on French Sign Language.. In Proceedings of the LREC 2026 12th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Language in Motion, pages 203–211, Palma, Mallorca (Spain). ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Learning to Spot Signs from Named Entities. A study on French Sign Language. (Halbout et al., SignLang 2026)
Copy Citation: