Action-Concentrated Embedding Framework: This Is Your Captain Sign-tokening

Abstract

Sign language is the primary communication medium for people who are deaf or have hearing loss. However, given the divergent range of sensory abilities of these individuals, there is a communication gap that needs to be addressed. In this paper, we present action-concentrated embedding (ACE), which is a novel sign token embedding framework. Additionally, to provide a more structured foundation for sign language analysis, we introduce a dedicated notation system tailored for sign language that endeavors to encapsulate the nuanced gestures and movements that are integral with sign communication. The proposed ACE approach tracks a signer’s actions based on human posture estimation. Tokenizing these actions and capturing the token embedding using a short-time Fourier transform encapsulates the time-based behavioral changes. Hence, ACE offers input embedding to translate sign language into natural language sentences. When tested against a disaster sign language dataset using automated machine translation measures, ACE notably surpasses prior research in terms of translation capabilities, improving the performance by up to 5.79% for BLEU-4 and 5.46% for ROUGE-L metric.