GASLA: Enhancing the Applicability of Sign Language Translation

This paper studies an important yet overlooked applicability issue in existing American sign language (ASL) translation systems. With excessive sensing data collected for each ASL word already, current designs treat every to-be-recognized sentence as new and collect their sensing data from scratch, while the amounts of sentences and the data samples per sentence are large usually. It takes a long time to complete the data collection for each single user, e.g., hours to a half day, which brings non-trivial burden to the end users inevitably and prevents the broader adoption of the ASL systems in practice. In this paper, we figure out the reason causing this issue. We present GASLA atop the wearable sensors to instrument our design. With GASLA, the sentence-level sensing data can be generated from the word-level data automatically, which can be then applied to train ASL systems. Moreover, GASLA has a clear interface to be integrated to existing ASL systems for overhead reduction directly. With this ability, sign language translation could become highly lightweight in both initial setup and future new-sentence addition. Compared with around 10 per-sentence data samples in current systems, GASLA requires 2–3 samples to achieve a similar performance.