@inproceedings{lepp-etal-2025-user,
    title = "User Involvement in the Research and Development Life Cycle of Sign Language Machine Translation Systems",
    author = "Lepp, Lisa  and
      Shterionov, Dimitar  and
      Sisto, Mirella De",
    editor = "Shterionov, Dimitar  and
      Sisto, Mirella De  and
      Vanroy, Bram  and
      Vandeghinste, Vincent  and
      Nyst, Victoria  and
      Vermeerbergen, Myriam  and
      Roelofsen, Floris  and
      Lepp, Lisa  and
      Strasly, Irene",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Automatic Translation for Signed and Spoken Languages (AT4SSL)",
    month = jun,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Geneva, Switzerland",
    publisher = "European Association for Machine Translation",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/mtsummit-25-ingestion/2025.at4ssl-1.3/",
    pages = "16--36",
    ISBN = "978-2-9701897-3-2",
    abstract = "Machine translation (MT) has evolved rapidly over the last 70 years thanks to the advances in processing technology, methodologies as well as the ever-increasing volumes of data. This trend is observed in the context of MT for spoken languages. However, when it comes to sign languages (SL) translation technologies, the progress is much slower; SLMT is still in its infancy with limited applications. One of the main factors for this set back is the lack of effective, respectful and fair user involvement across the different phases of the research and development of SLMT. We present a meta-review of 111 articles on SLMT from the perspective of user involvement. Our analysis investigates what users are involved and what tasks they assume in the first four phrases of MT research: (i) Problem and definition, (ii) Dataset construction, (iii) Model Design and Training, (iv) Model Validation and Evaluation. We find out that users have primarily been involved as data creators and monitors as well as evaluators. We assess that effective co-creation, as defined in (Lepp et al., 2025), has not been performed and conclude with recommendations for improving the MT research and development landscape from a co-creative perspective."
}