Towards Inclusive Communication: A Unified Framework for Generating Spoken Language from Sign, Lip, and Audio
This work addresses inclusivity in communication for deaf or hard-of-hearing individuals by integrating multiple modalities, though it is incremental as it builds on existing SLT, VSR, and ASR technologies.
The paper tackles the problem of audio-centric communication systems excluding deaf or hard-of-hearing individuals by proposing a unified framework that integrates sign language, lip movements, and audio for spoken-language text generation, achieving performance on par with or better than state-of-the-art models across tasks like SLT, VSR, ASR, and Audio-Visual Speech Recognition.
Audio is the primary modality for human communication and has driven the success of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technologies. However, such audio-centric systems inherently exclude individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing. Visual alternatives such as sign language and lip reading offer effective substitutes, and recent advances in Sign Language Translation (SLT) and Visual Speech Recognition (VSR) have improved audio-less communication. Yet, these modalities have largely been studied in isolation, and their integration within a unified framework remains underexplored. In this paper, we propose the first unified framework capable of handling diverse combinations of sign language, lip movements, and audio for spoken-language text generation. We focus on three main objectives: (i) designing a unified, modality-agnostic architecture capable of effectively processing heterogeneous inputs; (ii) exploring the underexamined synergy among modalities, particularly the role of lip movements as non-manual cues in sign language comprehension; and (iii) achieving performance on par with or superior to state-of-the-art models specialized for individual tasks. Building on this framework, we achieve performance on par with or better than task-specific state-of-the-art models across SLT, VSR, ASR, and Audio-Visual Speech Recognition. Furthermore, our analysis reveals a key linguistic insight: explicitly modeling lip movements as a distinct modality significantly improves SLT performance by capturing critical non-manual cues.