Cross-Lingual Keyword Search for Sign Language

Sign language research most often relies on exhaustively annotated and segmented data, which is scarce even for the most studied sign languages. However, parallel corpora consisting of sign language interpreting are rarely explored. By utilizing such data for the task of keyword search, this work aims to enable information retrieval from sign language with the queries from the translated written language. With the written language translations as labels, we train a weakly supervised keyword search model for sign language and further improve the retrieval performance with two context modeling strategies. In our experiments, we compare the gloss retrieval and cross language retrieval performance on RWTH-PHOENIX-Weather 2014T dataset.