SignGPT and the Visual Language Toolkit

Brown, Matt; Ranum, Oline; Fish, Edward; Proctor, Heidi; Woll, Bencie; Bowden, Richard; Cormier, Kearsy

SignGPT and the Visual Language Toolkit

Brown, Matt | Ranum, Oline | Fish, Edward | Proctor, Heidi | Woll, Bencie | Bowden, Richard | Cormier, Kearsy

Volume:: Proceedings of the LREC2026 12th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Language in Motion
Venue:: Palma, Mallorca, Spain
Date:: 16 May 2026
Pages:: 51–60
Publisher:: European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Licence:: CC BY-NC 4.0
sign-lang ID:: 26026
ISBN:: 978-2-493814-82-1

Abstract

SignGPT's Visual Language Toolkit (VLTK) aims to remove fundamental barriers to large scale sign language modelling by developing data-driven, linguistically grounded methods for continuous sign language recognition. We first identify fundamental issues around the ecological validity of potential data sources (e.g. broadcast media with interpreted signing or captions, scraping of social media). We contrast these with the currently highly resource-intensive development of curated sign language corpora based on linguistic principles. The VLTK addresses this scarcity of high quality sign language data by providing semi-automated glossing and other recognition tools, driving large scale corpus expansion without sacrificing linguistic principles. Unlike prior systems that rely on sparse glossing, the project integrates dense temporal annotation, non-manual and non-lexical feature tracking, and transformer-based architectures to capture the multimodal and spatial structure of signing. By aligning machine vision innovation with linguistic insights and community-embedded evaluation, SignGPT establishes a foundation for robust and extensible sign language models.

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Citation in ACL Citation Format

Matt Brown, Oline Ranum, Edward Fish, Heidi Proctor, Bencie Woll, Richard Bowden, Kearsy Cormier. 2026. SignGPT and the Visual Language Toolkit. In Proceedings of the LREC2026 12th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Language in Motion, pages 51–60, Palma, Mallorca, Spain. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).

BibTeX Export

@inproceedings{brown:26026:sign-lang:lrec,
  author    = {Brown, Matt and Ranum, Oline and Fish, Edward and Proctor, Heidi and Woll, Bencie and Bowden, Richard and Cormier, Kearsy},
  title     = {{SignGPT} and the Visual Language Toolkit},
  pages     = {51--60},
  editor    = {Efthimiou, Eleni and Fotinea, Stavroula-Evita and Hanke, Thomas and Hochgesang, Julie A. and Mesch, Johanna and Schulder, Marc},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the {LREC2026} 12th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Language in Motion},
  maintitle = {15th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC} 2026)},
  publisher = {{European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}},
  address   = {Palma, Mallorca, Spain},
  day       = {16},
  month     = may,
  year      = {2026},
  isbn      = {978-2-493814-82-1},
  language  = {english},
  url       = {https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/26026.html}
}