Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36 (NeurIPS 2023) Datasets and Benchmarks Track
Xin Shen, Shaozu Yuan, Hongwei Sheng, Heming Du, Xin Yu
Sign language translation (SLT) aims to convert a continuous sign language video clip into a spoken language. Considering different geographic regions generally have their own native sign languages, it is valuable to establish corresponding SLT datasets to support related communication and research. Auslan, as a sign language specific to Australia, still lacks a dedicated large-scale dataset for SLT.To fill this gap, we curate an Australian Sign Language translation dataset, dubbed Auslan-Daily, which is collected from the Auslan educational TV series and Auslan TV programs. The former involves daily communications among multiple signers in the wild, while the latter comprises sign language videos for up-to-date news, weather forecasts, and documentaries. In particular, Auslan-Daily has two main features: (1) the topics are diverse and signed by multiple signers, and (2) the scenes in our dataset are more complex, e.g., captured in various environments, gesture interference during multi-signers' interactions and various camera positions. With a collection of more than 45 hours of high-quality Auslan video materials, we invite Auslan experts to align different fine-grained visual and language pairs, including video $\leftrightarrow$ fingerspelling, video $\leftrightarrow$ gloss, and video $\leftrightarrow$ sentence. As a result, Auslan-Daily contains multi-grained annotations that can be utilized to accomplish various fundamental sign language tasks, such as signer detection, sign spotting, fingerspelling detection, isolated sign language recognition, sign language translation and alignment. Moreover, we benchmark results with state-of-the-art models for each task in Auslan-Daily. Experiments indicate that Auslan-Daily is a highly challenging SLT dataset, and we hope this dataset will contribute to the development of Auslan and the advancement of sign languages worldwide in a broader context. All datasets and benchmarks are available at Auslan-Daily.