@inproceedings{imai-etal-2025-silverscore,
    title = "{S}i{LVERS}core: Semantically-Aware Embeddings for Sign Language Generation Evaluation",
    author = "Imai, Saki  and
      Inan, Mert  and
      Sicilia, Anthony B.  and
      Alikhani, Malihe",
    editor = "Angelova, Galia  and
      Kunilovskaya, Maria  and
      Escribe, Marie  and
      Mitkov, Ruslan",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing - Natural Language Processing in the Generative AI Era",
    month = sep,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Varna, Bulgaria",
    publisher = "INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/corrections-2026-01/2025.ranlp-1.54/",
    pages = "452--461",
    abstract = "Evaluating sign language generation is often done through back-translation, where generated signs are first recognized back to text and then compared to a reference using text-based metrics. However, this two-step evaluation pipeline introduces ambiguity: it not only fails to capture the multimodal nature of sign language{---}such as facial expressions, spatial grammar, and prosody{---}but also makes it hard to pinpoint whether evaluation errors come from sign generation model or the translation system used to assess it. In this work, we propose SiLVERScore, a novel semantically-aware embedding-based evaluation metric that assesses sign language generation in a joint embedding space. Our contributions include: (1) identifying limitations of existing metrics, (2) introducing SiLVERScore for semantically-aware evaluation, (3) demonstrating its robustness to semantic and prosodic variations, and (4) exploring generalization challenges across datasets. On PHOENIX-14T and CSL-Daily datasets, SiLVERScore achieves near-perfect discrimination between correct and random pairs (ROC AUC = 0.99, overlap {\ensuremath{<}} 7{\%}), substantially outperforming traditional metrics."
}