The American Sign Language Knowledge Graph: Infusing ASL Models with Linguistic Knowledge

Lee Kezar, Nidhi Munikote, Zian Zeng, Zed Sehyr, Naomi Caselli, Jesse Thomason


Abstract
Sign language models could make modern language technologies more accessible to those who sign, but the supply of accurately labeled data struggles to meet the demand associated with training large, end-to-end neural models. As an alternative to this approach, we explore how knowledge about the linguistic structure of signs may be used as inductive priors for learning sign recognition and comprehension tasks. We first construct the American Sign Language Knowledge Graph (ASLKG) from 11 sources of linguistic knowledge, with emphasis on features related to signs’ phonological and lexical-semantic properties. Then, we use the ASLKG to train neuro-symbolic models on ASL video input tasks, achieving accuracies of 91% for isolated sign recognition, 14% for predicting the semantic features of unseen signs, and 36% for classifying the topic of Youtube-ASL videos.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-naacl.389
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025
Month:
April
Year:
2025
Address:
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Editors:
Luis Chiruzzo, Alan Ritter, Lu Wang
Venue:
Findings
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
7017–7029
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/Ingest-2025-COMPUTEL/2025.findings-naacl.389/
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Cite (ACL):
Lee Kezar, Nidhi Munikote, Zian Zeng, Zed Sehyr, Naomi Caselli, and Jesse Thomason. 2025. The American Sign Language Knowledge Graph: Infusing ASL Models with Linguistic Knowledge. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025, pages 7017–7029, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
The American Sign Language Knowledge Graph: Infusing ASL Models with Linguistic Knowledge (Kezar et al., Findings 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/Ingest-2025-COMPUTEL/2025.findings-naacl.389.pdf