We present SignCLIP, which re-purposes CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining) to project spoken language text and sign language videos, two classes of natural languages of distinct modalities, into the same space. SignCLIP is an efficient method of learning useful visual representations for sign language processing from large-scale, multilingual video-text pairs, without directly optimizing for a specific task or sign language which is often of limited size.We pretrain SignCLIP on Spreadthesign, a prominent sign language dictionary consisting of ~500 thousand video clips in up to 44 sign languages, and evaluate it with various downstream datasets. SignCLIP discerns in-domain signing with notable text-to-video/video-to-text retrieval accuracy. It also performs competitively for out-of-domain downstream tasks such as isolated sign language recognition upon essential few-shot prompting or fine-tuning.We analyze the latent space formed by the spoken language text and sign language poses, which provides additional linguistic insights. Our code and models are openly available.

This paper describes the submission of the TALP-UPC team to the Problem List Summarization task from the BioNLP 2023 workshop. This task consists of automatically extracting a list of health issues from the e-health medical record of a given patient. Our submission combines additional steps of data annotationwith finetuning of BERT pre-trained language models. Our experiments focus on the impact of finetuning on different datasets as well as the addition of data augmentation techniques to delay overfitting.

Transformer-based models have been achieving state-of-the-art results in several fields of Natural Language Processing. However, its direct application to speech tasks is not trivial. The nature of this sequences carries problems such as long sequence lengths and redundancy between adjacent tokens. Therefore, we believe that regular self-attention mechanism might not be well suited for it. Different approaches have been proposed to overcome these problems, such as the use of efficient attention mechanisms. However, the use of these methods usually comes with a cost, which is a performance reduction caused by information loss. In this study, we present the Multiformer, a Transformer-based model which allows the use of different attention mechanisms on each head. By doing this, the model is able to bias the self-attention towards the extraction of more diverse token interactions, and the information loss is reduced. Finally, we perform an analysis of the head contributions, and we observe that those architectures where all heads relevance is uniformly distributed obtain better results. Our results show that mixing attention patterns along the different heads and layers outperforms our baseline by up to 0.7 BLEU.