A Reverse Sign Language Dictionary: Open-Vocabulary Sign Recognition from Continuous Signing via Video Captioning and Description Retrieval
Isolated Sign Language Recognition (ISLR) is conventionally cast as closed-set classification over gloss labels, which cannot generalize to signs unseen in training and ties every deployment to a gloss-annotated lexicon. We instead recognize signs extracted from continuous signing by (1) captioning a sign-level clip into a free-form procedural description of the articulation with an open-weight vision-language model, and (2) retrieving the closest entry from a vocabulary of target descriptions with a multilingual sentence encoder: a reverse sign language dictionary that needs no gloss supervision and admits an open vocabulary. On 1,300 sign-level segments from a Japanese Sign Language (JS...
| Authors | Santiago Poveda-Gutiérrez, Hideki Nakayama, Mayumi Bono |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CV |
| Published | 3 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 3 September 2026 |
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