Towards Continuous Sign Language Conversation from Isolated Signs

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel approach to create continuous sign language conversations from isolated signs, leveraging large-scale datasets, a retrieval-guided translation, and a diffusion Transformer model to improve sign language AI systems.

Contribution

It presents SignaVox-W and SignaVox-U datasets, a retrieval-guided translation method, and BRAID diffusion Transformer for duration alignment, enabling sign-to-sign conversational modeling.

Findings

Enhanced motion quality in continuous sign language generation

Improved semantic alignment of sign responses

Scalable signer-centered interaction for sign language AI

Abstract

Sign language is the primary language for many Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing (DHH) signers, yet most conversational AI systems still mediate interaction through spoken or written language. This spoken-language-centered interface can limit access for signers for whom spoken or written language is not the most accessible medium, motivating direct sign-to-sign conversational modeling. However, sentence-level sign video data are expensive to collect and annotate, leaving existing sign translation and production models with limited vocabulary coverage and weak open-domain generalization. We address this bottleneck by constructing continuous sign conversations from isolated signs: large-scale labeled isolated clips are collected as lexically grounded motion primitives and recomposed into sign-language-ordered utterances derived from existing dialogue corpora. We introduce SignaVox-W, which provides, to our knowledge, the largest labeled isolated-sign vocabulary to date, and SignaVox-U, a continuous 3D sign conversation dataset built from SignaVox-W. To bridge structural mismatch between spoken and signed languages, we use a retrieval-guided spoken-to-gloss translator; to bridge independently collected isolated clips, we propose BRAID, a diffusion Transformer that performs duration alignment and co-articulatory boundary inpainting. With the resulting data, we train SignaVox, a direct sign-to-sign conversational model that generates 3D body, hand, and facial motion responses from prior signing context without spoken-language text or externally provided glosses at inference time. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations show improved isolated-to-continuous motion quality, stronger response-level semantic alignment, and scalable signer-centered interaction that better supports visual-spatial articulation.