@inproceedings{muller-etal-2023-considerations,
    title = "Considerations for meaningful sign language machine translation based on glosses",
    author = {M{\"u}ller, Mathias  and
      Jiang, Zifan  and
      Moryossef, Amit  and
      Rios, Annette  and
      Ebling, Sarah},
    editor = "Rogers, Anna  and
      Boyd-Graber, Jordan  and
      Okazaki, Naoaki",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2023",
    address = "Toronto, Canada",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-short.60",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2023.acl-short.60",
    pages = "682--693",
    abstract = "Automatic sign language processing is gaining popularity in Natural Language Processing (NLP) research (Yin et al., 2021). In machine translation (MT) in particular, sign language translation based on glosses is a prominent approach. In this paper, we review recent works on neural gloss translation. We find that limitations of glosses in general and limitations of specific datasets are not discussed in a transparent manner and that there is no common standard for evaluation. To address these issues, we put forward concrete recommendations for future research on gloss translation. Our suggestions advocate awareness of the inherent limitations of gloss-based approaches, realistic datasets, stronger baselines and convincing evaluation.",
}

Automatic sign language processing is gaining popularity in Natural Language Processing (NLP) research (Yin et al., 2021). In machine translation (MT) in particular, sign language translation based on glosses is a prominent approach. In this paper, we review recent works on neural gloss translation. We find that limitations of glosses in general and limitations of specific datasets are not discussed in a transparent manner and that there is no common standard for evaluation. To address these issues, we put forward concrete recommendations for future research on gloss translation. Our suggestions advocate awareness of the inherent limitations of gloss-based approaches, realistic datasets, stronger baselines and convincing evaluation.
M{\"u}ller, Mathias Jiang, Zifan Moryossef, Amit Rios, Annette Ebling, Sarah
Considerations for meaningful sign language machine translation based on glosses