Text-to-ISL Gloss Translation: Bridging Language Accessibility Through NLP

Author(s)	Shanmukhaa M S, Geetha Ramani R
Country	India
Abstract	The lack of representation of Indian Sign Language (ISL) in technological innovation hinders communication for India's Deaf community. This research addresses this problem by introducing a system for transcribing English sentences into ISL gloss, a formalized textual representation of ISL grammar. The proposed approach utilizes a Sequence-to-Sequence (seq2seq) model with a Bidirectional LSTM (BiLSTM) encoder and an LSTM decoder to capture the mapping of English syntax to ISL gloss structure. Due to the absence of public English-ISL gloss datasets, a specialized corpus of 10368 sentence pairs was created in collaboration with ISL experts. The system's performance was evaluated using BLEU and ROUGE-L F1 scores on a test set of 2074 sentences, yielding encouraging results under various training settings. This work provides a foundation for future studies in ISL video generation and its integration into accessible education and communication devices, ultimately aiming for enhanced digital accessibility and inclusive technology.
Keywords	Indian Sign Language, Gloss Translation, Seq2Seq, BiLSTM, NLP, Accessibility
Field	Computer > Data / Information
Published In	Volume 16, Issue 2, April-June 2025
Published On	2025-05-14
DOI	https://doi.org/10.71097/IJSAT.v16.i2.5092
Short DOI	https://doi.org/g9kc5z

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International Journal on Science and Technology