ASL STEM Wiki: Dataset and Benchmark for Interpreting STEM Articles
This addresses barriers in STEM education for deaf and hard-of-hearing students by providing a novel dataset, though it is incremental as it builds on existing interpretation efforts.
The authors tackled the lack of STEM resources in signed languages for deaf and hard-of-hearing students by creating ASL STEM Wiki, a dataset of 254 Wikipedia articles interpreted into over 300 hours of American Sign Language, and developed models to identify fingerspelled words to improve accessibility.
Deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) students face significant barriers in accessing science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education, notably due to the scarcity of STEM resources in signed languages. To help address this, we introduce ASL STEM Wiki: a parallel corpus of 254 Wikipedia articles on STEM topics in English, interpreted into over 300 hours of American Sign Language (ASL). ASL STEM Wiki is the first continuous signing dataset focused on STEM, facilitating the development of AI resources for STEM education in ASL. We identify several use cases of ASL STEM Wiki with human-centered applications. For example, because this dataset highlights the frequent use of fingerspelling for technical concepts, which inhibits DHH students' ability to learn, we develop models to identify fingerspelled words -- which can later be used to query for appropriate ASL signs to suggest to interpreters.