Content4All Open Research Sign Language Translation Datasets

TL;DR

This paper introduces six large-scale sign language datasets from news footage, including 20 hours annotated by experts, to facilitate the development of real-world sign language translation applications.

Contribution

It provides a substantial dataset collection with annotation tools and baseline results, addressing the lack of large-scale datasets in sign language research.

Findings

Six datasets totaling 190 hours of footage

20 hours annotated by Deaf experts and interpreters

Baseline translation results provided

Abstract

Computational sign language research lacks the large-scale datasets that enables the creation of useful reallife applications. To date, most research has been limited to prototype systems on small domains of discourse, e.g. weather forecasts. To address this issue and to push the field forward, we release six datasets comprised of 190 hours of footage on the larger domain of news. From this, 20 hours of footage have been annotated by Deaf experts and interpreters and is made publicly available for research purposes. In this paper, we share the dataset collection process and tools developed to enable the alignment of sign language video and subtitles, as well as baseline translation results to underpin future research.