@inproceedings{ni-etal-2026-sign,
    title = "Sign-Language Datasets at Scale: A Comprehensive Survey on Resources, Benchmarks, and Annotation Standards",
    author = "Ni, Yiming  and
      Cheng, Zhi-Qi  and
      Li, Jiayu  and
      Cheng, Wei",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1928/",
    pages = "41578--41604",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-390-6",
    abstract = "Sign languages are expressive visual languages used by Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing (DHH) communities. Despite substantial progress in sign-language recognition, translation, and production, advances remain constrained by fragmented datasets, inconsistent annotations, and limited linguistic coverage. Existing benchmarks often fail to reflect real-world communication needs, and systematic analyses of these limitations remain limited. In this survey, we present a comprehensive index of sign-language datasets, covering 120 resources across 35 sign languages. We analyze key challenges such as modality imbalance, annotation granularity, and signer bias, and outline considerations for future dataset design. We also introduce a 24-field Sign-Language Datasheet and release a public GitHub repository to support standardized documentation and reproducible evaluation. Overall, our work provides a unified and practical foundation for developing inclusive, robust, and scalable sign-language technologies in real-world applications."
}