Seventh International Workshop on
Sign Language Translation and Avatar Technology:
The Junction of the Visual and the Textual

Recent research in the use of 3D virtual human characters, or avatars, to animate sign language promises to provide increased accessibility for deaf people via the Internet on a range of computing devices. In addition, avatars support sign linguistics research, providing a potential target for translation from spoken and other sign languages, and shedding light on human factors of sign language usage.

Submissions are invited for a half-day workshop on sign language resources, to take place following the 2022 LREC conference. The workshop aims to bring together researchers who already work with multimodal sign language corpora with those who develop sign language avatar technologies. Several national projects are currently underway, and more are planned. This workshop aims to share experiences from current and past efforts. What problems were encountered and what linguistic decisions were taken?

We invite abstracts for presentation or poster on the following topics:

2022 Hot Topics

• Multilingualism and Language Technology for All
  • Leveraging pre-existing representations and corpora to develop technologies for under-resourced sign languages
  • Developing multimodal and multilingual corpora for sign language translation
• Language Resources for Emergency Needs
  • Identification and evaluation of sign language usage for emergency and time-sensitive notification
  • Sign language resources for Emergency situations
• Machine Learning and Multimodality
  • Mapping techniques between the visual domain and the linguistic annotations
  • Compensating for the size of currently available sign language corpora
  • Human-computer interfaces to sign language data and sign language annotation profiting from Machine Learning

General Issues on Sign Language Translation and Avatar Technology

• Symbolic Translation
  • Use of corpora to inform translation
  • Modelling signing space for classifier construction, and constructed action
  • Incorporation of non-manual features in production
  • Emotional and prosodic aspects
• Avatar Animation
  • Requirements for signing avatar technology
  • Linguistically informed notations for gestural animation
  • Use of corpora to inform animation
  • Realistic portrayal of sign language
  • Flexibility in animation of facial gestures and mouthing
• Usability
  • Evaluation methods for sign translation systems
  • Acceptability of signing avatars
  • Editing tools for signing texts

In the tradition of LREC, oral/signed presentations and poster presentations (with or without demonstrations) have equal status, and authors are encouraged to suggest the presentation format best suited to communicate their ideas. Papers (4, 6 or 8 pages) of all accepted submissions to this workshop will be published as workshop proceedings published on the conference website - independent of whether you have a poster or an oral/signed presentation.

Please submit your paper through the LREC START system not later than April 10, 2022, indicating whether you prefer an oral/signed, a poster presentation or a poster presentation with demo.

ATTENTION Please note that you are expected to submit the full paper, not an extended abstract as in previous years!

Identify, Describe and Share your LRs!

Describing your LRs in the LRE Map is now a normal practice in the submission procedure of LREC (introduced in 2010 and adopted by other conferences). To continue the efforts initiated at LREC 2014 about "Sharing LRs" (data, tools, web-services, etc.), authors will have the possibility, when submitting a paper, to upload LRs in a special LREC repository. This effort of sharing LRs, linked to the LRE Map for their description, may become a new 'regular' feature for conferences in our field, thus contributing to creating a common repository where everyone can deposit and share data.

As scientific work requires accurate citations of referenced work so as to allow the community to understand the whole context and also replicate the experiments conducted by other researchers, LREC 2022 endorses the need to uniquely Identify LRs through the use of the International Standard Language Resource Number (ISLRN, www.islrn.org), a Persistent Unique Identifier to be assigned to each Language Resource. The assignment of ISLRNs to LRs cited in LREC papers will be offered at submission time.

The symposium languages are English and International Sign, with interpretation between these two languages provided by the symposium. Participants who prefer to bring interpreters for their national sign l anguage are kindly encouraged to do so and to contact the organizers in advance so we can plan accommodations accordingly.