YouTube-SL-25: A Large-Scale, Open-Domain Multilingual Sign Language
  Parallel Corpus
Authors: name: Garrett Tanzer; name: Biao Zhang
Published: 2024-07-15 18:08:34

Abstract: Even for better-studied sign languages like American Sign Language (ASL),
data is the bottleneck for machine learning research. The situation is worse
yet for the many other sign languages used by Deaf/Hard of Hearing communities
around the world. In this paper, we present YouTube-SL-25, a large-scale,
open-domain multilingual corpus of sign language videos with seemingly
well-aligned captions drawn from YouTube. With >3000 hours of videos across >25
sign languages, YouTube-SL-25 is a) >3x the size of YouTube-ASL, b) the largest
parallel sign language dataset to date, and c) the first or largest parallel
dataset for many of its component languages. We provide baselines for
sign-to-text tasks using a unified multilingual multitask model based on T5 and
report scores on benchmarks across 4 sign languages. The results demonstrate
that multilingual transfer benefits both higher- and lower-resource sign
languages within YouTube-SL-25.