Spatio-temporal Sign Language Representation and Translation

Yasser Hamidullah, Josef Van Genabith, Cristina España-bonet


Abstract
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 $5{pm1$ BLEU points on the development set, but the performance on the test dropped to $0.11{pm0.06$ BLEU points.
Anthology ID:
2022.wmt-1.94
Volume:
Proceedings of the Seventh Conference on Machine Translation (WMT)
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid)
Venue:
WMT
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
977–982
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.wmt-1.94
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yasser Hamidullah, Josef Van Genabith, and Cristina España-bonet. 2022. Spatio-temporal Sign Language Representation and Translation. In Proceedings of the Seventh Conference on Machine Translation (WMT), pages 977–982, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Spatio-temporal Sign Language Representation and Translation (Hamidullah et al., WMT 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/2022.wmt-1.94.pdf