Sign Language Translation (SLT) first uses a Sign Language Recognition (SLR) system to extract sign language glosses from videos. Then, a translation system generates spoken language translations from the sign language glosses. Though SLT has gathered interest recently, little study has been performed on the translation system. This paper focuses on the translation system and improves performance by utilizing Transformer networks. We report a wide range of experimental results for various Transformer setups and introduce the use of Spatial-Temporal Multi-Cue (STMC) networks in an end-to-end SLT system with Transformer. We perform experiments on RWTH-PHOENIX-Weather 2014T, a challenging SLT benchmark dataset of German sign language, and ASLG-PC12, a dataset involving American Sign Language (ASL) recently used in gloss-to-text translation. Our methodology improves on the current state-of-the-art by over 5 and 7 points respectively in BLEU-4 score on ground truth glosses and by using an STMC network to predict glosses of the RWTH-PHOENIX-Weather 2014T dataset. On the ASLG-PC12 corpus, we report an improvement of over 16 points in BLEU-4. Our findings also demonstrate that end-to-end translation on predicted glosses provides even better performance than translation on ground truth glosses. This shows potential for further improvement in SLT by either jointly training the SLR and translation systems or by revising the gloss annotation system .
Sign Language Translation (SLT) first uses a Sign Language Recognition (SLR) system to extract sign language glosses from videos. Then, a translation system generates spoken language translations from the sign language glosses. This paper focuses on the translation system and introduces the STMC-Transformer which improves on the current state-of-the-art by over 5 and 7 BLEU respectively on gloss-to-text and video-to-text translation of the PHOENIX-Weather 2014T dataset. On the ASLG-PC12 corpus, we report an increase of over 16 BLEU. We also demonstrate the problem in current methods that rely on gloss supervision. The video-to-text translation of our STMC-Transformer outperforms translation of GT glosses. This contradicts previous claims that GT gloss translation acts as an upper bound for SLT performance and reveals that glosses are an inefficient representation of sign language. For future SLT research, we therefore suggest an end-to-end training of the recognition and translation models, or using a different sign language annotation scheme .
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Though SLT has gathered interest recently, little study has been performed on the translation system.
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improves performance by utilizing Transformer networks. We report a wide range of experimental results for various Transformer setups and introduce the use of Spatial-Temporal Multi-Cue (STMC) networks in an end-to-end SLT system with Transformer. We perform experiments on RWTH-PHOENIX-Weather 2014T, a challenging SLT benchmark dataset of German sign language, and ASLG-PC12, a dataset involving American Sign Language (ASL) recently used in gloss-to-text translation. Our methodology
introduces the STMC-Transformer which
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points respectively in BLEU-4 score on ground truth glosses and by using an STMC network to predict glosses of the RWTH-PHOENIX-Weather
BLEU respectively on gloss-to-text and video-to-text translation of the PHOENIX-Weather
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improvement
increase
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points in BLEU-4. Our findings also demonstrate that end-to-end translation on predicted glosses provides even better performance than translation on ground truth
BLEU. We also demonstrate the problem in current methods that rely on gloss supervision. The video-to-text translation of our STMC-Transformer outperforms translation of GT
R
shows potential for further improvement in SLT by either jointly training the SLR and translation systems or by revising the gloss annotation system
contradicts previous claims that GT gloss translation acts as an upper bound for SLT performance and reveals that glosses are an inefficient representation of sign language. For future SLT research, we therefore suggest an end-to-end training of the recognition and translation models, or using a different sign language annotation scheme