arXiv Computation and Language By Thapelo Sindane, Unarine Netshifhefhe, Vukosi Marivate, Abiodun Modupe, Herkulaas Combrink, Ketro Sithole

Maswao: An automatically collected, prepared, and benchmarked dataset for South African Sign Language

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The paper introduces Maswao, a dataset of South African Sign Language (SASL) created through automated collection and preparation of video content from public sources, minimal human labor, and weak sentence alignment using audio-to-text ASR and motion analysis. The authors benchmark the dataset on sign‑to‑text translation, showing Transformer models outperform recurrent baselines with BLEU‑1 to BLEU‑4 scores ranging from 13.78 to 1.54. The study highlights the potential of automated dataset creation for under‑represented sign languages and demonstrates promising translation results that encourage further research.

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arXiv Computation and Language
Nov 4

Maswao: An automatically collected, prepared, and benchmarked dataset for the South African Sign language

The paper introduces Maswao, a new dataset for South African Sign Language (SASL) created through automated collection and preparation of video content from public sources. The authors convert accompanying audio to text, crop sign regions, and use gradient descent to segment sentences, producing weakly sentence-aligned parallel corpora. They benchmark this dataset on sign-to-text translation, showing Transformer models outperform recurrent baselines with BLEU-1 to BLEU-4 scores up to 13.78, 5.21, 2.52, and 1.54, respectively.

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