Much of the world’s population experiences some form of disability during their lifetime. Caution must be exercised while designing natural language processing (NLP) systems to prevent systems from inadvertently perpetuating ableist bias against people with disabilities, i.e., prejudice that favors those with typical abilities. We report on various analyses based on word predictions of a large-scale BERT language model. Statistically significant results demonstrate that people with disabilities can be disadvantaged. Findings also explore overlapping forms of discrimination related to interconnected gender and race identities.

We have collected a new dataset consisting of color and depth videos of fluent American Sign Language (ASL) signers performing sequences of 100 ASL signs from a Kinect v2 sensor. This directed dataset had originally been collected as part of an ongoing collaborative project, to aid in the development of a sign-recognition system for identifying occurrences of these 100 signs in video. The set of words consist of vocabulary items that would commonly be learned in a first-year ASL course offered at a university, although the specific set of signs selected for inclusion in the dataset had been motivated by project-related factors. Given increasing interest among sign-recognition and other computer-vision researchers in red-green-blue-depth (RBGD) video, we release this dataset for use by the research community. In addition to the RGB video files, we share depth and HD face data as well as additional features of face, hands, and body produced through post-processing of this data.