J-Shuwa: A Large-Scale Web-Collected Japanese Sign Language-Japanese Parallel Corpus

Junwen Mo, MinhDuc Vo, Noriki Nishida, Shin'ichi Satoh, Hideki Nakayama


Abstract
Japanese Sign Language (JSL) is a low-resource sign language that has received limited attention in the AI research community, primarily due to the lack of large-scale, publicly available parallel corpora. In this work, we introduce J-Shuwa, a large-scale JSL-Japanese parallel corpus constructed from YouTube videos with hard-coded subtitles and closed captions. The corpus contains 197K parallel JSL-Japanese sentence pairs, totaling approximately 300 hours of video, making it the largest publicly available JSL dataset to date. We conduct sign language translation (SLT) experiments by training models on J-Shuwa and evaluating them on the JSL Dialogue Corpus under both zero-shot and fine-tuned settings. Our results demonstrate that J-Shuwa is effective for training SLT models. Beyond SLT, we believe that J-Shuwa can also serve as a valuable resource for future JSL research across a wide range of tasks. The dataset and code are publicly available at: https://github.com/SpaJune/J-Shuwa.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-acl.1821
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Month:
July
Year:
2026
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San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
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Findings
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Association for Computational Linguistics
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36559–36574
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.1821/
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Cite (ACL):
Junwen Mo, MinhDuc Vo, Noriki Nishida, Shin'ichi Satoh, and Hideki Nakayama. 2026. J-Shuwa: A Large-Scale Web-Collected Japanese Sign Language-Japanese Parallel Corpus. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026, pages 36559–36574, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
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J-Shuwa: A Large-Scale Web-Collected Japanese Sign Language-Japanese Parallel Corpus (Mo et al., Findings 2026)
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