Translating Spanish into Spanish Sign Language: Combining Rules and Data-driven Approaches

AbstractThis paper presents a series of experiments on translating between spoken Spanish and Spanish Sign Language glosses (LSE), including enriching Neural Machine Translation (NMT) systems with linguistic features, and creating synthetic data to pretrain and later on finetune a neural translation model. We found evidence that pretraining over a large corpus of LSE synthetic data aligned to Spanish sentences could markedly improve the performance of the translation models.