Most of the sign language recognition (SLR) systems rely on supervision for training and available annotated sign language resources are scarce due to the difficulties of manual labeling. Unsupervised discovery of lexical units would facilitate the annotation process and thus lead to better SLR systems. Inspired by the unsupervised spoken term discovery in speech processing field, we investigate whether a similar approach can be applied in sign language to discover repeating lexical units. We adapt an algorithm that is designed for spoken term discovery by using hand shape and pose features instead of speech features. The experiments are run on a large scale continuous sign corpus and the performance is evaluated using gloss level annotations. This work introduces a new task for sign language processing that has not been addressed before.
Keywords
Machine / Deep Learning – Machine Learning methods both in the visual domain and on linguistic annotation of sign language data
Machine / Deep Learning – Human-computer interfaces to sign language data and sign language annotation profiting from Machine Learning
Sign language corpus mining
Machine / Deep Learning – How to get along with the size of sign language resources actually existing
@inproceedings{polat:20033:sign-lang:lrec,
author = {Polat, Korhan and Sara{\c c}lar, Murat},
title = {Unsupervised Term Discovery for Continuous Sign Language},
pages = {189--196},
editor = {Efthimiou, Eleni and Fotinea, Stavroula-Evita and Hanke, Thomas and Hochgesang, Julie A. and Kristoffersen, Jette and Mesch, Johanna},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the {LREC2020} 9th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Sign Language Resources in the Service of the Language Community, Technological Challenges and Application Perspectives},
maintitle = {12th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC} 2020)},
publisher = {{European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}},
address = {Marseille, France},
day = {16},
month = may,
year = {2020},
isbn = {979-10-95546-54-2},
language = {english},
url = {https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/20033.pdf}
}