Challenge: open-source application for real-time multilingual bi-directional translation between spoken and signed languages.
Approach: They present an open-source application for real-time multilingual bi-directional translation between spoken and signed languages.
Outcome: The open-source sign.mt application aims to address the communication divide between the hearing and the deaf.

Similar Papers

Machine Translation between Spoken Languages and Signed Languages Represented in SignWriting (2023.findings-eacl)

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Challenge: Yin et al. ( 2021) calls for including sign language processing (SLP) in natural language processing research.
Approach: They propose to use a sign language writing system to parse, factorize, decode and evaluate signed languages.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves over 30 BLEU in a bilingual setup and over 20 BLUE in two multilingual setups.
Multilingual Gloss-free Sign Language Translation: Towards Building a Sign Language Foundation Model (2025.acl-short)

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Challenge: Existing studies focus on translating a single SL into a spoken language (one-to-one SLT) however, multilingual SLT remains unexplored due to language conflicts and alignment difficulties across SLs and spoken languages.
Approach: They propose a multilingual gloss-free model that can be used to translate a single SL into a spoken language and generate a token-level SL identification and spoken text.
Outcome: The proposed model supports 10 SLs and handles one-to-one, many-to-1, and many- to-many SLT tasks.
How to Align Multiple Signed Language Corpora for Better Sign-to-Sign Translations? (2025.naacl-long)

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Challenge: despite the growing need for advanced signing technologies, signed language resources remain scarce.
Approach: They propose a linguistically informed alignment algorithm that matches instances between signed languages . they compare similarities and differences across three signed languages to develop a model .
Outcome: The proposed algorithm performs well on automatic metrics for sign-to-sign translation and generation.
Considerations for meaningful sign language machine translation based on glosses (2023.acl-short)

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Challenge: In machine translation, sign language translation based on glosses is becoming more popular . limitations of glossed approaches are not discussed in a transparent manner, and there is no common standard for evaluation.
Approach: They propose to use a gloss-based approach to evaluate machine translation results . they propose to include realistic datasets, stronger baselines and convincing evaluation .
Outcome: The proposed approach is based on a neural gloss translation model.
Sign-Language Datasets at Scale: A Comprehensive Survey on Resources, Benchmarks, and Annotation Standards (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing benchmarks fail to reflect real-world communication needs and are limited in their coverage.
Approach: They present a comprehensive index of sign-language datasets, covering 120 resources across 35 sign languages.
Outcome: The proposed index covers 120 resources across 35 sign languages.
MS2SL: Multimodal Spoken Data-Driven Continuous Sign Language Production (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing solutions for sign language production are limited due to phonological differences and data scarcity.
Approach: They propose a unified framework for continuous sign language production that generates sign predictions step by step from text or speech embeddings.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves competitive performance on how2sign and PHOENIX14T datasets.
Open-Domain Sign Language Translation Learned from Online Video (2022.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing work on sign language translation has focused mainly on data collected in controlled environments or domains, which limits its applicability to real-world settings.
Approach: They propose to use sign search as a pretext task and fusion of mouthing and handshape features to improve sign language translation in real-world settings.
Outcome: The proposed techniques produce consistent and large improvements over baseline models based on prior work.
Neural Machine Translation Methods for Translating Text to Sign Language Glosses (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: State-of-the-art techniques common to low resource Machine Translation (MT) are applied to improve MT of spoken language text to Sign Language glosses.
Approach: They propose to use data augmentation, semi-supervised Neural Machine Translation, transfer learning and multilingual NMT to improve MT of spoken language to Sign Language glosses.
Outcome: The proposed models outperform previous work on two German SL corpora and are confirmed by human evaluation.
SignAlignLM: Integrating Multimodal Sign Language Processing into Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing (DHH) users increasingly utilize Large Language Models (LLMs), yet face significant challenges due to these models’ limited understanding of sign language grammar, multimodal sign inputs, and Deafic cultural contexts.
Approach: They propose to use sign language support in LLMs to integrate sign linguistic rules and conventions into prompting and fine-tuning strategies to address the needs of DHH users.
Outcome: The proposed model can be generalized interfaces for both spoken and signed languages if trained with a multitasking paradigm.
JWSign: A Highly Multilingual Corpus of Bible Translations for more Diversity in Sign Language Processing (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing sign language datasets are limited and skewed towards high-income sign languages, mainly those from high-risk countries.
Approach: They propose a large and highly multilingual dataset for sign language translation: JWSign.
Outcome: The proposed dataset consists of 2,530 hours of Bible translations in 98 sign languages, featuring more than 1,500 individual signers.

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