Generating Signed Language Instructions in Large-Scale Dialogue Systems
Mert Inan, Katherine Atwell, Anthony Sicilia, Lorna Quandt, Malihe Alikhani
Abstract
We introduce a goal-oriented conversational AI system enhanced with American Sign Language (ASL) instructions, presenting the first implementation of such a system on a worldwide multimodal conversational AI platform. Accessible through a touch-based interface, our system receives input from users and seamlessly generates ASL instructions by leveraging retrieval methods and cognitively based gloss translations. Central to our design is a sign translation module powered by Large Language Models, alongside a token-based video retrieval system for delivering instructional content from recipes and wikiHow guides. Our development process is deeply rooted in a commitment to community engagement, incorporating insights from the Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing community, as well as experts in cognitive and ASL learning sciences. The effectiveness of our signing instructions is validated by user feedback, achieving ratings on par with those of the system in its non-signing variant. Additionally, our system demonstrates exceptional performance in retrieval accuracy and text-generation quality, measured by metrics such as BERTScore. We have made our codebase and datasets publicly accessible at https://github.com/Merterm/signed-dialogue, and a demo of our signed instruction video retrieval system is available at https://huggingface.co/spaces/merterm/signed-instructions.- Anthology ID:
- 2024.naacl-industry.13
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 6: Industry Track)
- Month:
- June
- Year:
- 2024
- Address:
- Mexico City, Mexico
- Editors:
- Yi Yang, Aida Davani, Avi Sil, Anoop Kumar
- Venue:
- NAACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 140–154
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-industry.13
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Mert Inan, Katherine Atwell, Anthony Sicilia, Lorna Quandt, and Malihe Alikhani. 2024. Generating Signed Language Instructions in Large-Scale Dialogue Systems. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 6: Industry Track), pages 140–154, Mexico City, Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Generating Signed Language Instructions in Large-Scale Dialogue Systems (Inan et al., NAACL 2024)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/jeptaln-2024-ingestion/2024.naacl-industry.13.pdf