Changing the Representation: Examining Language Representation for Neural Sign Language Production

Harry Walsh, Ben Saunders, Richard Bowden


Abstract
Neural Sign Language Production (SLP) aims to automatically translate from spoken language sentences to sign language videos. Historically the SLP task has been broken into two steps; Firstly, translating from a spoken language sentence to a gloss sequence and secondly, producing a sign language video given a sequence of glosses. In this paper we apply Natural Language Processing techniques to the first step of the SLP pipeline. We use language models such as BERT and Word2Vec to create better sentence level embeddings, and apply several tokenization techniques, demonstrating how these improve performance on the low resource translation task of Text to Gloss. We introduce Text to HamNoSys (T2H) translation, and show the advantages of using a phonetic representation for sign language translation rather than a sign level gloss representation. Furthermore, we use HamNoSys to extract the hand shape of a sign and use this as additional supervision during training, further increasing the performance on T2H. Assembling best practise, we achieve a BLEU-4 score of 26.99 on the MineDGS dataset and 25.09 on PHOENIX14T, two new state-of-the-art baselines.
Anthology ID:
2022.sltat-1.18
Volume:
Proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Sign Language Translation and Avatar Technology: The Junction of the Visual and the Textual: Challenges and Perspectives
Month:
June
Year:
2022
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Eleni Efthimiou, Stavroula-Evita Fotinea, Thomas Hanke, John C. McDonald, Dimitar Shterionov, Rosalee Wolfe
Venue:
SLTAT
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
117–124
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.sltat-1.18
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Harry Walsh, Ben Saunders, and Richard Bowden. 2022. Changing the Representation: Examining Language Representation for Neural Sign Language Production. In Proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Sign Language Translation and Avatar Technology: The Junction of the Visual and the Textual: Challenges and Perspectives, pages 117–124, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Changing the Representation: Examining Language Representation for Neural Sign Language Production (Walsh et al., SLTAT 2022)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.sltat-1.18.pdf