Metric-Learning Retrieval for Cross-Signer Isolated Sign Language Recognition

Md. Asif Ali, Md. Mosharaf Hossain Apurbo, Kazi Reyazul Hasan


Abstract
We address cross-signer Isolated Sign Language Recognition (ISLR) for Indian Sign Language as part of the WSLP-2026 shared task, where most target words have exactly one available training video and a system must recognize a query video performed by a signer never seen for that class during training. We approach this with a metric-learning encoder trained in two phases: pretraining on a large, multi-signer American Sign Language corpus to learn general signer-invariance, then fine-tuning on the target vocabulary using every real cross-signer recording we can responsibly source. Our preprocessing detects and extracts multiple performances of a word within a single recording as separate training samples, a technique not previously reported in SLR literature, and adapts a published missing-keypoint interpolation technique into a retrieval rather than classification pipeline. Our final system achieves 67.11% Top-1, 69.20% Top-5, and 70.34% Top-10 accuracy on the WSLP-2026 test-phase evaluation.
Anthology ID:
2026.wslp-1.7
Volume:
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Sign Language Processing
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Sanjeet Singh, Abhinav Joshi, Pokala Dattatreya, Keren Artiaga, Khushi Jaydeep Pujara, Tomáš Železný, Ivan Gruber, Jakub Honzík, Sabyasachi Kamila, Facundo Manuel Quiroga, Marek Hrúz, Mohammed Hasanuzzaman, Ashutosh Modi
Venues:
WSLP | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
70–76
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.wslp-1.7/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Md. Asif Ali, Md. Mosharaf Hossain Apurbo, and Kazi Reyazul Hasan. 2026. Metric-Learning Retrieval for Cross-Signer Isolated Sign Language Recognition. In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Sign Language Processing, pages 70–76, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Metric-Learning Retrieval for Cross-Signer Isolated Sign Language Recognition (Ali et al., WSLP 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.wslp-1.7.pdf