Example-Based Machine Translation from Textto a Hierarchical Representation of Sign Language
Elise Bertin-Lemée, Annelies Braffort, Camille Challant, Claire Danet, Michael Filhol
Abstract
This article presents an original method for Text-to-Sign Translation. It compensates data scarcity using a domain-specific parallel corpus of alignments between text and hierarchical formal descriptions of Sign Language videos. Based on the detection of similarities present in the source text, the proposed algorithm recursively exploits matches and substitutions of aligned segments to build multiple candidate translations for a novel statement. This helps preserving Sign Language structures as much as possible before falling back on literal translations too quickly, in a generative way. The resulting translations are in the form of AZee expressions, designed to be used as input to avatar synthesis systems. We present a test set tailored to showcase its potential for expressiveness and generation of idiomatic target language, and observed limitations. This work finally opens prospects on how to evaluate this kind of translation.- Anthology ID:
- 2023.eamt-1.3
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 24th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation
- Month:
- June
- Year:
- 2023
- Address:
- Tampere, Finland
- Editors:
- Mary Nurminen, Judith Brenner, Maarit Koponen, Sirkku Latomaa, Mikhail Mikhailov, Frederike Schierl, Tharindu Ranasinghe, Eva Vanmassenhove, Sergi Alvarez Vidal, Nora Aranberri, Mara Nunziatini, Carla Parra Escartín, Mikel Forcada, Maja Popovic, Carolina Scarton, Helena Moniz
- Venue:
- EAMT
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- European Association for Machine Translation
- Note:
- Pages:
- 21–30
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2023.eamt-1.3
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Elise Bertin-Lemée, Annelies Braffort, Camille Challant, Claire Danet, and Michael Filhol. 2023. Example-Based Machine Translation from Textto a Hierarchical Representation of Sign Language. In Proceedings of the 24th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation, pages 21–30, Tampere, Finland. European Association for Machine Translation.
- Cite (Informal):
- Example-Based Machine Translation from Textto a Hierarchical Representation of Sign Language (Bertin-Lemée et al., EAMT 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2023.eamt-1.3.pdf