Findings of the First WMT Shared Task on Sign Language Translation (WMT-SLT22)

Mathias Müller, Michèle Berger, Cristina España-Bonet, Amit Moryossef, Dimitar Shterionov, Sarah Ebling, Richard Bowden, Roman Grundkiewicz, Regula Perrollaz, Sandra Sidler-Misere, Eleftherios Avramidis, Annelies Braffort, Zifan Jiang, Sabine Reinhard, Katja Tissi, Alessia Battisti, Necati Cihan Camgöz, Oscar Koller, Annette Rios, Davy Van Landuyt

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

18 Scopus citations

Abstract

This paper presents the results of the First WMT Shared Task on Sign Language Translation (WMT-SLT22). This shared task is concerned with automatic translation between signed and spoken2 languages. The task is novel in the sense that it requires processing visual information (such as video frames or human pose estimation) beyond the well-known paradigm of text-to-text machine translation (MT). The task featured two tracks, translating from Swiss German Sign Language (DSGS) to German and vice versa. Seven teams participated in this first edition of the task, all submitting to the DSGS-to-German track. Besides a system ranking and system papers describing state-of-the-art techniques, this shared task makes the following scientific contributions: novel corpora, reproducible baseline systems and new protocols and software for human evaluation. Finally, the task also resulted in the first publicly available set of system outputs and human evaluation scores for sign language translation.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationWMT 2022 - 7th Conference on Machine Translation, Proceedings of the Conference
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics
Pages744-772
Number of pages29
ISBN (Electronic)9781959429296
StatePublished - 2022
Event7th Conference on Machine Translation, WMT 2022 - Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Duration: 7 Dec 20228 Dec 2022

Publication series

NameConference on Machine Translation - Proceedings
ISSN (Electronic)2768-0983

Conference

Conference7th Conference on Machine Translation, WMT 2022
Country/TerritoryUnited Arab Emirates
CityAbu Dhabi
Period7/12/228/12/22

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 Association for Computational Linguistics.

Funding

This shared task was funded by the European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT) and by Microsoft AI for Accessibility. We are grateful for their support which enabled us to provide test data, human evaluation and interpretation in International Sign during the WMT conference. The organizing committee further acknowledge funding from the following projects: the EU Horizon 2020 projects EASIER (grant agreement number 101016982) and SignON (101017255), the Swiss Innovation Agency (Innosuisse) flagship IICT (PFFS-21-47) and the German Ministry of Education and Research through the project So-cialWear (01IW20002).

FundersFunder number
Microsoft AI
SignON101017255
Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung01IW20002
Horizon 2020101016982
Innosuisse - Schweizerische Agentur für InnovationsförderungPFFS-21-47
European Association for Machine Translation

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