May the force be with you: Force-aligned signwriting for automatic subunit annotation of corpora

We propose a method to generate linguistically meaningful subunits in a fully automated fashion for sign language corpora. The ability to automate the process of subunit annotation has profound effects on the data available for training sign language recognition systems. The approach is based on the idea that subunits are shared among different signs. With sufficient data and knowledge of possible signing variants, accurate automatic subunit sequences are produced, matching the specific characteristics of given sign language data. Specifically we demonstrate how an iterative forced alignment algorithm can be used to transfer the knowledge of a user-edited open sign language dictionary to the task of annotating a challenging, large vocabulary, multi-signer corpus recorded from public TV. Existing approaches focus on labour intensive manual subunit annotations or on data-driven approaches. Our method yields an average precision and recall of 15% under the maximum achievable accuracy with little user intervention beyond providing a simple word gloss.