Challenge: Existing methods for sign language translation rely on glosses, which are written representations of signs.
Approach: They propose a new LLM-based SLT framework that uses off-the-shelf visual encoders to extract spatial and motion features from sign videos.
Outcome: The proposed framework captures spatial configurations and motion dynamics in sign language without domain-specific tuning.

Similar Papers

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.
Gloss2Text: Sign Language Gloss translation using LLMs and Semantically Aware Label Smoothing (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to sign language translation use gloss annotations as an intermediary . a new approach to use large language models and word embeddings to improve Gloss2Text translation is needed.
Approach: They propose to leverage large language models pre-trained on expansive and diverse corpora to improve Gloss2Text translation stage by using data augmentation and label-smoothing loss function.
Outcome: The proposed approach surpasses state-of-the-art methods on the PHOENIX Weather 2014T dataset . it shows that gloss annotations can be used to guide the translation process .
Factorized Learning Assisted with Large Language Model for Gloss-free Sign Language Translation (2024.lrec-main)

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Challenge: Previous Sign Language Translation methods have relied on gloss annotations to improve performance, but labeling high-quality glosses is labor-intensive and inefficient.
Approach: They propose to integrate Large Language Model (LLM) into SLT by factorizing learning into two stages to improve the learning curve.
Outcome: The proposed approach improves on three SLT datasets conducted under the gloss-free setting.
Better Sign Language Translation with STMC-Transformer (2020.coling-main)

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Challenge: Current SLT approaches use a sign language recognition system to extract sign language glosses from videos.
Approach: They propose to use a Sign Language Recognition system to extract sign language glosses from videos and a translation system to generate spoken language translations from the glossed sign language.
Outcome: The proposed system outperforms existing methods on gloss-to-text and video-to text translations on the ASLG-PC12 corpus.
Can Small Vision–Language Models Perform Sign Language Translation? (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown strong generalization across multimodal tasks, but their capacity to handle sign language translation (SLT) remains unclear.
Approach: They propose entity- and semantics-aware metrics tailored for SLT to evaluate their performance.
Outcome: The proposed metrics highlight the limitations of general-purpose VLMs to SLT, unlike their applicability in other tasks.
Think in Latent Thoughts: A New Paradigm for Gloss-Free Sign Language Translation (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to sign language translation (SLT) assume video segments are directly mappable to spoken-language words.
Approach: They propose a reasoning-driven SLT framework that uses an ordered sequence of latent thoughts as an explicit middle layer between video and generated text.
Outcome: The proposed model improves coherence and faithfulness over existing gloss-free methods.
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.
Gloss-Free End-to-End Sign Language Translation (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: a study of sign language translation without gloss annotations focuses on the problem of gloss annotation . gloss annotation is hard to acquire, especially in large quantities, and limits the domain coverage of translation datasets .
Approach: They propose a gloss-free end-to-end sign language translation framework to solve this problem . gloss annotations are hard to acquire, especially in large quantities, they argue .
Outcome: The proposed framework improves sign language translation performance on large-scale datasets . gloss annotations are hard to acquire, especially in large quantities .
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.
Explore More Guidance: A Task-aware Instruction Network for Sign Language Translation Enhanced with Data Augmentation (2022.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: Existing studies focus on the recognition step, while paying less attention to sign language translation.
Approach: They propose a task-aware instruction network, namely TIN-SLT, for sign language translation, by introducing the isntruction module and the learning-based feature fuse strategy into a Transformer network.
Outcome: The proposed system outperforms existing solutions on two benchmark datasets, PHOENIX-2014-T and ASLG-PC12, and outperformed previous best solutions by 1.65 and 1.42 in terms of BLEU-4.

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