OpenASL: A Large-Scale Open-Domain Sign Language Translation Dataset

Introduction

This repo contains OpenASL dataset proposed in paper: Open-Domain Sign Language Translation Learned from Online Video

If you use OpenASL data in your research, please use the following BibTeX entry for citation.

@inproceedings{shi2022open,
  author = {Bowen Shi and Diane Brentari and Greg Shakhnarovich and Karen Livescu},
  title = {Open-Domain Sign Language Translation Learned from Online Video},
  booktitle = {EMNLP},
  year = {2022}
}

Change Log

2025-07-22: Video downloading has been migrated from youtube-dl to yt-dlp due to issues observed with youtube-dl. After switching, the downloading script should now work as expected.

Instructions

1. Download videos

Run the following command to download videos into /path/to/raw-video.

python prep/download.py --tsv data/openasl-v1.0.tsv --dest /path/to/raw-video

If you are on slurm, you can parallelize the video downloading with the following command:

python prep/download.py --tsv data/openasl-v1.0.tsv --dest /path/to/raw-video --nshard ${nshard} --slurm

where ${nshard} is the number of jobs to launch. The slurm arguments can be modified via --slurm-argument '{"slurm_array_parallelism":100,"slurm_partition":"cpu","timeout_min":240,"slurm_mem":"16g"}'.

Note: Some videos may no longer be publicly available.

2. Video preprocessing

The following command will trim the raw video into clips and spatially crop the video clips.

python prep/crop_video.py --tsv data/openasl-v1.0.tsv --bbox data/bbox-v1.0.json --raw /path/to/raw-video --output /path/to/video-clip --ffmpeg /path/to/ffmpeg

The processed video will be saved into /path/to/video-clip. data/bbox-v1.0.json contains the person bounding box of each video clip in the format of [x0,y0,x1,y1] normalized by the image width and height. Note the bounding boxes are generated based on face detection plus some heuristic processing and are not proofread by humans. Roughly the error rate is below 1%.

Similar to step 1, you can parallelize this step on slurm.

python prep/crop_video.py --tsv data/openasl-v1.0.tsv --bbox data/bbox-v1.0.json --raw /path/to/raw-video --output /path/to/video-clip --ffmpeg /path/to/ffmpeg --slurm --nshard ${nshard}

License

OpenASL is licensed under the Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0 License - see LICENSE for more details.