@inproceedings{tanzer-2025-fingerspelling,
    title = "Fingerspelling within Sign Language Translation",
    author = "Tanzer, Garrett",
    editor = "Chiruzzo, Luis  and
      Ritter, Alan  and
      Wang, Lu",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = apr,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Albuquerque, New Mexico",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/moar-dois/2025.naacl-long.19/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.naacl-long.19",
    pages = "385--464",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-189-6",
    abstract = "Fingerspelling poses challenges for sign language processing due to its high-frequency motion and use for open-vocabulary terms. While prior work has studied fingerspelling recognition, there has been little attention to evaluating how well sign language translation models understand fingerspelling in the context of entire sentences{---}and improving this capability. We manually annotate instances of fingerspelling within FLEURS-ASL and use them to evaluate the effect of two simple measures to improve fingerspelling recognition within American Sign Language to English translation: 1) use a model family (ByT5) with character- rather than subword-level tokenization, and 2) mix fingerspelling recognition data into the translation training mixture. We find that 1) substantially improves understanding of fingerspelling (and translation quality overall), but the effect of 2) is mixed."
}