Large Sign Language Models: Toward 3D American Sign Language Translation
This work addresses digital communication accessibility for the hearing-impaired community by enabling more accurate ASL translation, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing LLMs with a new data modality.
The paper tackles the problem of translating 3D American Sign Language (ASL) by introducing Large Sign Language Models (LSLM), a framework that uses Large Language Models to process 3D data for more accurate and resilient translation, enhancing accessibility for hearing-impaired individuals.
We present Large Sign Language Models (LSLM), a novel framework for translating 3D American Sign Language (ASL) by leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) as the backbone, which can benefit hearing-impaired individuals' virtual communication. Unlike existing sign language recognition methods that rely on 2D video, our approach directly utilizes 3D sign language data to capture rich spatial, gestural, and depth information in 3D scenes. This enables more accurate and resilient translation, enhancing digital communication accessibility for the hearing-impaired community. Beyond the task of ASL translation, our work explores the integration of complex, embodied multimodal languages into the processing capabilities of LLMs, moving beyond purely text-based inputs to broaden their understanding of human communication. We investigate both direct translation from 3D gesture features to text and an instruction-guided setting where translations can be modulated by external prompts, offering greater flexibility. This work provides a foundational step toward inclusive, multimodal intelligent systems capable of understanding diverse forms of language.