What's the Point? Spatial Grammar & Index Resolution for Sign Language Processing
Sign language models are predominantly trained with gloss-sequence or text supervision, thereby under-modeling non-lexical and productive constructions. One comparatively tractable instance is spatial indexing: pointing gestures that assign discourse entities to spatial loci for subsequent co-reference, which lexicon-centric objectives largely fail to capture. We present a targeted evaluation of indexing in Sign Language Recognition, showing that despite comprising 10-15% of signing content, indexing is poorly recovered. We introduce a framework for training and evaluating indexing experts, establishing a baseline for index-aware sign language modeling. Our approach decomposes spatial ref...
| Authors | Oline Ranum, Simon Hadfield, Richard Bowden |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 6 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 6 June 2026 |
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