{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/improvement-in-sign-language-translation","title":"Improvement in Sign Language Translation Using Text CTC Alignment","arxiv_id":"2412.09014","date":"2024-12-12","proceeding":null,"authors":["Sihan Tan","Taro Miyazaki","Nabeela Khan","Kazuhiro Nakadai"],"abstract":"Current sign language translation (SLT) approaches often rely on gloss-based supervision with Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC), limiting their ability to handle non-monotonic alignments between sign language video and spoken text. In this work, we propose a novel method combining joint CTC/Attention and transfer learning. The joint CTC/Attention introduces hierarchical encoding and integrates CTC with the attention mechanism during decoding, effectively managing both monotonic and non-monotonic alignments. Meanwhile, transfer learning helps bridge the modality gap between vision and language in SLT. Experimental results on two widely adopted benchmarks, RWTH-PHOENIX-Weather 2014 T and CSL-Daily, show that our method achieves results comparable to state-of-the-art and outperforms the pure-attention baseline. Additionally, this work opens a new door for future research into gloss-free SLT using text-based CTC alignment.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.09014v4","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.09014v4.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"improvement-in-sign-language-translation","repo_url":"https://github.com/Claire874/TextCTC-SLT","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"sign-language-translation","task_name":"Sign Language Translation"},{"task_slug":"transfer-learning","task_name":"Transfer Learning"},{"task_slug":"translation","task_name":"Translation"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"attention","method_name":"Attention"},{"method_slug":"softmax","method_name":"Softmax"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2412.09014","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}