Maximus Shengelia
2024
Reconsidering Sentence-Level Sign Language Translation
Garrett Tanzer
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Maximus Shengelia
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Ken Harrenstien
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David Uthus
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Historically, sign language machine translation has been posed as a sentence-level task: datasets consisting of continuous narratives are chopped up and presented to the model as isolated clips. In this work, we explore the limitations of this task framing. First, we survey a number of linguistic phenomena in sign languages that depend on discourse-level context. Then as a case study, we perform the first human baseline for sign language translation that actually substitutes a human into the machine learning task framing, rather than provide the human with the entire document as context. This human baseline—for ASL to English translation on the How2Sign dataset—shows that for 33% of sentences in our sample, our fluent Deaf signer annotators were only able to understand key parts of the clip in light of additional discourse-level context. These results underscore the importance of understanding and sanity checking examples when adapting machine learning to new domains.
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