Considerations for meaningful sign language machine translation based on glosses

Mathias Müller, Zifan Jiang, Amit Moryossef, Annette Rios, Sarah Ebling


Abstract
Automatic sign language processing is gaining popularity in Natural Language Processing (NLP) research (Yin et al., 2021). In machine translation (MT) in particular, sign language translation based on glosses is a prominent approach. In this paper, we review recent works on neural gloss translation. We find that limitations of glosses in general and limitations of specific datasets are not discussed in a transparent manner and that there is no common standard for evaluation. To address these issues, we put forward concrete recommendations for future research on gloss translation. Our suggestions advocate awareness of the inherent limitations of gloss-based approaches, realistic datasets, stronger baselines and convincing evaluation.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-short.60
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
682–693
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-short.60
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-short.60
Award:
 Outstanding Paper Award
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mathias Müller, Zifan Jiang, Amit Moryossef, Annette Rios, and Sarah Ebling. 2023. Considerations for meaningful sign language machine translation based on glosses. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers), pages 682–693, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Considerations for meaningful sign language machine translation based on glosses (Müller et al., ACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-short.60.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-short.60.mp4