Gloss-Based Pipeline for Spoken to Signed Language Translation

a text-to-gloss-to-pose-to-video pipeline for spoken to signed language translation.

• Demos available for:

  • 🇩🇪 Swiss German Sign Language 🇨🇭
  • 🇫🇷 French Sign Language of Switzerland🇨🇭
  • 🇮🇹 Italian Sign Language of Switzerland 🇨🇭

• Paper available on arxiv, presented at AT4SSL 2023.

Install

pip install spoken-to-signed

Then, to download a lexicon, run:

download_lexicon \
  --name <signsuisse> \
  --directory <path_to_directory>

Usage

For language codes, we use the IANA Language Subtag Registry. Our pipeline provides multiple scripts.

To quickly demo it using a dummy lexicon, either open it in Colab:

<a target="_blank" href="https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1UtBmfBIhUa2EdLMnWJr0hxAOZelQ50_9?usp=sharing"> <img src="https://colab.research.google.com/assets/colab-badge.svg" alt="Open In Colab"/> </a>

or run it locally with some installation steps first:

git clone https://github.com/ZurichNLP/spoken-to-signed-translation
cd spoken-to-signed-translation

pip install .

text_to_gloss_to_pose \
  --text "Kleine Kinder essen Pizza in Zürich." \
  --glosser "simple" \
  --lexicon "assets/dummy_lexicon" \
  --spoken-language "de" \
  --signed-language "sgg" \
  --pose "quick_test.pose"

Text-to-Gloss Translation

This script translates input text into gloss notation.

text_to_gloss \
  --text <input_text> \
  --glosser <simple|spacylemma|rules|nmt> \
  --spoken-language <de|fr|it> \
  --signed-language <sgg|ssr|slf>

Text-to-Gloss-to-Pose Translation

This script translates input text into gloss notation, then converts the glosses into a pose file.

text_to_gloss_to_pose \
  --text <input_text> \
  --glosser <simple|spacylemma|rules|nmt> \
  --lexicon <path_to_directory> \
  --spoken-language <de|fr|it> \
  --signed-language <sgg|ssr|slf> \
  --pose <output_pose_file_path>.pose

Words missing from the lexicon are fingerspelled letter-by-letter by default; pass --disable-fingerspelling to skip them instead.

Add --coverage-info to print how each token was matched, color-coded in the terminal (green: lexicon, yellow: language backup, orange: fingerspelling, red: unmatched), or --coverage-stats <file.json> to save the same per-token information as JSON.

Text-to-Gloss-to-Pose-to-Video Translation

This script translates input text into gloss notation, converts the glosses into a pose file, and then transforms the pose file into a video.

Note: Video generation requires the pose-to-video package with pix2pix and upscaler:

pip install 'pose-to-video[pix2pix,simple_upscaler] @ git+https://github.com/sign-language-processing/pose-to-video'

text_to_gloss_to_pose_to_video \
  --text <input_text> \
  --glosser <simple|spacylemma|rules|nmt> \
  --lexicon <path_to_directory> \
  --spoken-language <de|fr|it> \
  --signed-language <sgg|ssr|slf> \
  --video <output_video_file_path>.mp4

Methodology

The pipeline consists of three main components:

1. Text-to-Gloss Translation

   Transforms the input (spoken language) text into a sequence of glosses.

• Simple lemmatizer,
• Spacy lemmatizer: more accurate, but slower lemmatization, covering fewer languages than simple,
• Rule-based word reordering and dropping component and
• Neural machine translation system.

2. Gloss-to-Pose Conversion

• Lookup: Uses a lexicon of signed languages to convert the sequence of glosses into a sequence of poses.
• Pose Concatenation: The poses are then cropped, concatenated, and smoothed, creating a pose representation for the input sentence.

3. Pose-to-Video Generation

   Transforms the processed pose video back into a synthesized video using an image translation model.

Supported Languages

| Language | IANA Code | Glossers Supported | Lexicon Data Source | |-----------------------------|-----------|------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|------------------------------------------------------| | Swiss German Sign Language | sgg | simple, spacylemma, rules, nmt | SignSuisse (de) | | Swiss French Sign Language | ssr | simple, spacylemma | SignSuisse (fr) | | Swiss Italian Sign Language | slf | simple, spacylemma | SignSuisse (it) | | German Sign Language | gsg | simple, spacylemma, nmt | WordNet (Coming Soon) | | British Sign Language | bfi | simple, spacylemma, nmt | WordNet (Coming Soon) |

Online Playgrounds

We have two available:

• sign.mt is a web interface of a translation system.
• research.sign.mt is an overview of sign language processing literature.

Citation

If you find this work useful, please cite our paper:

@inproceedings{moryossef2023baseline,
  title={An Open-Source Gloss-Based Baseline for Spoken to Signed Language Translation},
  author={Moryossef, Amit and M{\"u}ller, Mathias and G{\"o}hring, Anne and Jiang, Zifan and Goldberg, Yoav and Ebling, Sarah},
  booktitle={2nd International Workshop on Automatic Translation for Signed and Spoken Languages (AT4SSL)},
  year={2023},
  month={June},
  url={https://github.com/ZurichNLP/spoken-to-signed-translation},
  note={Available at: \url{https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.17714}}
}