Yasser Hamidullah


2022

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Spatio-temporal Sign Language Representation and Translation
Yasser Hamidullah | Josef Van Genabith | Cristina España-bonet
Proceedings of the Seventh Conference on Machine Translation (WMT)

This paper describes the DFKI-MLT submission to the WMT-SLT 2022 sign language translation (SLT) task from Swiss German Sign Language (video) into German (text). State-of-the-art techniques for SLT use a generic seq2seq architecture with customized input embeddings. Instead of word embeddings as used in textual machine translation, SLT systems use features extracted from video frames. Standard approaches often do not benefit from temporal features. In our participation, we present a system that learns spatio-temporal feature representations and translation in a single model, resulting in a real end-to-end architecture expected to better generalize to new data sets. Our best system achieved 5 ± 1 BLEU points on the development set, but the performance on the test dropped to 0.11 ± 0.06 BLEU points.

2021

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AVASAG: A German Sign Language Translation System for Public Services (short paper)
Fabrizio Nunnari | Judith Bauerdiek | Lucas Bernhard | Cristina España-Bonet | Corinna Jäger | Amelie Unger | Kristoffer Waldow | Sonja Wecker | Elisabeth André | Stephan Busemann | Christian Dold | Arnulph Fuhrmann | Patrick Gebhard | Yasser Hamidullah | Marcel Hauck | Yvonne Kossel | Martin Misiak | Dieter Wallach | Alexander Stricker
Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Automatic Translation for Signed and Spoken Languages (AT4SSL)

This paper presents an overview of AVASAG; an ongoing applied-research project developing a text-to-sign-language translation system for public services. We describe the scientific innovation points (geometry-based SL-description, 3D animation and video corpus, simplified annotation scheme, motion capture strategy) and the overall translation pipeline.