We are excited to announce the first edition of the Shared Task on Sign Language Translation (WMT-SLT) at WMT 2022, co-located with EMNLP 2022.
*NEW DEVELOPMENTS SINCE THE FIRST CALL*
(1) Release of training data
The training data comprises two corpora, called FocusNews and SRF. The linguistic domain of both corpora is general news, and both contain parallel data between Swiss German Sign Language (DSGS) and German. The corpora are distributed through Zenodo.
The FocusNews data originates from a former Deaf online TV channel, FocusFive. The videos feature Deaf signers of DSGS. The SRF data are daily national news and weather forecast episodes broadcast by the Swiss National TV (Schweizerisches Radio und Fernsehen, SRF). The episodes are narrated in German and interpreted into Swiss German Sign Language (DSGS).
Please see https://www.wmt-slt.com/data for more information.
(2) Release of baseline code
We provide code to train baseline systems for DSGS to German in a public Github repository. The codebase contains scripts to preprocess data, train, translate and evaluate models.
Please see https://www.wmt-slt.com/tools for more information.
*OVERVIEW*
This shared task is concerned with automatic translation between signed and spoken languages. The task is novel in the sense that it requires processing visual information (such as video frames or human pose estimation) beyond the well-known paradigm of text-to-text machine translation.
We provide training data for one language pair: Swiss German Sign Language (DSGS) and German (DE).
Translation from DSGS to German is our primary translation direction: submitted systems are ranked on a leaderboard and we will provide baseline systems. Systems translating from German to DSGS are not ranked on the leaderboard while the task is running, but we still encourage participants to submit such systems.
We aim to provide human evaluation for all submitted systems, regardless of the translation direction.
We will ask participants to submit a system description paper to WMT 2022.
*IMPORTANT DATES*
* 12 June 2022: Release of training data
* 12 June 2022: Release of baseline systems
* 14 July 2022: Release of test data
* 28 July 2022: System submission deadline
* 4 August 2022: System paper abstract submission deadline
* 7 September 2022: Paper submission deadline
* 9 October 2022: Paper acceptance notification
* 16 October 2022: Camera-ready version due
* 7-8 December 2022: Overview of results at WMT
All deadlines are AoE (Anywhere on Earth). Dates are in line with general deadlines of WMT.
*ORGANIZERS*
* Mathias Müller, University of Zurich
* Sarah Ebling, University of Zurich
* Necati Cihan Camgöz, University of Surrey
* Amit Moryossef, Bar-Ilan University / University of Zurich
* Zifan Jiang, University of Zurich
* Annette Rios, University of Zurich
* Alessia Battisti, University of Zurich
* Davy Van Landuyt, European Union of the Deaf
* Richard Bowden, University of Surrey
* Oscar Koller, Microsoft Research
* Annelies Braffort, Paris-Saclay University, CNRS, LISN
* Dimitar Shterionov, Tilburg University
* Katja Tissi, University of Teacher Education in Special Needs Zurich (HfH)
* Sandra Sidler-Miserez, University of Teacher Education in Special Needs Zurich (HfH)
* Regula Perrollaz, University of Teacher Education in Special Needs Zurich (HfH)
* Michèle Berger, University of Teacher Education in Special Needs Zurich (HfH)
* Sabine Reinhard, University of Teacher Education in Special Needs Zurich (HfH)
* Cristina España-Bonet, DFKI Saarbrücken
* Eleftherios Avramidis, DFKI Berlin
*MORE INFORMATION*
For more information, please visit our website: www.wmt-slt.com
If you have any comments and/or questions, do not hesitate to ask a question on the mailing list: wmt-tasks [at] googlegroups.com or contact us: mmueller [at] cl.uzh.ch.