Beyond BLEU: A Case for Redefining Sign Language Translation Benchmarks
BLEU-4 is the standard metric for evaluating sign language translation (SLT), but spoken-language metrics may not adequately reflect sign language proficiency. The multimodal, low-resource context of SLT allows models to exploit spurious correlations and spoken-language priors, rather than learning stronger sign representations. In this paper, we evaluate the relationship between spatio-temporal understanding and BLEU-4 across six SLT models on Phoenix-2014T and CSL-Daily, showing that gains in BLEU-4 are not on their own evidence of better sign language understanding. This work introduces an alternative inspired by language-learning assessment, using an open-weight-LLM QA protocol that m...
| Authors | Oline Ranum, Edward Fish, Simon Hadfield et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 3 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 3 September 2026 |
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