Facilitating the Spread of New Sign Language Technologies across Europe

Hope Morgan, Onno Crasborn, Maria Kopf, Marc Schulder, Thomas Hanke

Abstract
For developing sign language technologies like automatic translation, huge amounts of training data are required. Even the larger corpora available for some sign languages are tiny compared to the amounts of data used for corresponding spoken language technologies. The overarching goal of the European project EASIER is to develop a framework for bidirectional automatic translation between sign and spoken languages and between sign languages. One part of this multi-dimensional project is that it will pool available language resources from European sign languages into a larger dataset to address the data scarcity problem. This approach promises to open the floor for lower-resourced sign languages in Europe. This article focusses on efforts in the EASIER project to allow for new languages to make use of such technologies in the future. What are the characteristics of sign language resources needed to train recognition, translation, and synthesis algorithms, and how can other countries including those without any sign resources follow along with these developments? The efforts undertaken in EASIER include creating workflow documents and organizing training sessions in online workshops. They reflect the current state of the art, and will likely need to be updated in the coming decade.
Anthology ID:
2022.signlang-1.22
Volume:
Proceedings of the LREC2022 10th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Multilingual Sign Language Resources
Month:
June
Year:
2022
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Eleni Efthimiou, Stavroula-Evita Fotinea, Thomas Hanke, Julie A. Hochgesang, Jette Kristoffersen, Johanna Mesch, Marc Schulder
Venue:
SignLang
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
144–147
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.signlang-1.22
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hope Morgan, Onno Crasborn, Maria Kopf, Marc Schulder, and Thomas Hanke. 2022. Facilitating the Spread of New Sign Language Technologies across Europe. In Proceedings of the LREC2022 10th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Multilingual Sign Language Resources, pages 144–147, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Facilitating the Spread of New Sign Language Technologies across Europe (Morgan et al., SignLang 2022)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-2/2022.signlang-1.22.pdf
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