June 25, 2021
CVPR 2021
At a workshop titled “ChaLearn LAP Sign Language Recognition in the Wild” at the conference for Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), UGent partners presented work on sign language recognition models in the context of a machine learning challenge.
Location: Online
July 9, 2021
CLIN31
The 31st Meeting of Computational Linguistics in the Netherlands. A team from SignON presented a poster titled “The SignON project: a Sign Language Translation Framework”. SignON hosted a booth there with the support of TaalUnie.
Location: Online
August 20, 2021
AT4SSL Workshop
First International Workshop on Automatic Translation for Signed and Spoken Languages (conducted within the MTSummit2021).2 One long paper3 and one short paper4 related to the SignON project were presented at the workshop.
Location: Online
September 6, 2021
BUCC2021
Santiago Egea Gómez, Euan McGill and Horacio Saggion gave a presentation about their publication on Text to Sign Gloss Translation in the 14th Workshop on Building and Using Comparable Corpora.
Location: Online
September 21, 2021
SEPLN2021
The SignON project was presented at an online conference: the XXXVII International Conference of the Spanish Society for Natural Language Processing.
Location: Online
November 12, 2021
TaalStudio’s forum “Language and Technology: A Successful combination”
The workshop is part of the Translation Europe-project of the European Commission, and was about different topics such as automatic translation/interpretation and various applications of language technology. In his session, our scientific project leader Dimitar Shterionov (TiU) talked about the SignON project, differences and similarities between sign and spoken languages, and technical challenges related to machine translation. After his lecture there was a brainstorming session with students about what would be a good way to represent sign language in a written-like form.
Location: Utrecht, The Netherlands
November 15, 2021
META-Forum 2021
SignON had a booth at the project expo on the first day of META-FORUM, the international conference series on powerful and innovative Language Technologies for the multilingual information society.
Location: Online
November 15, 2021
LEAD ME Winter Training Shool Madrid 2021
UPF-GTI ran the 2-hour workshop Virtual Signers generation within SignON at the winter school Media Accessibility Training: Sign Language and Subtitling for the Deaf and Hard-of-hearing organised by the COST action LEAD ME (Leading Platform for European Citizens, Industries, Academia and Policymakers in Media Accessibility), attended by around 25 persons.
Location: Online
November 20, 2021
VGTC’s workshop “Language police or not?”
A workshop in Flanders (Belgium) organised by VGTC where a short presentation of the SignON Project was given to about hundred Flemish signers, followed by a Q&A session.
Location: Ghent, Belgium
November 26, 2021
IRAAL 2021
Dr Irene Murtagh (TU Dublin), Prof. Lorraine Leeson (TCD) and Rachel Moiselle (TCD) co-presented on the topic of “Sign Languages and Language Technology.
Location: Online
December 9, 2021
AICS2021
Frank Fowley and Anthony Ventresque gave a presentation about their publication on Sign Language Fingerspelling Recognition at the 29th Irish Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science.
Location: Online
May 13, 2022
NITS2022
Tim Van de Cruys (KU Leuven) gave an overview of the SignON project in the Network of Interdisciplinary Translation Studies in the Netherlands and Flanders.
Location: Groningen, the Netherlands
May 16, 2022
Interparliamentary Committee of Taalunie in the Flemish Parliament
Catia Cucchiarini and Jorn Rijckaert explained the SignON Project at the Interparliamentary Committee of Taalunie in the Flemish Parliament to raise awareness about sign language technology and its challenges, and how the Flemish community can contribute to this.
Location: Brussels, Belgium
May 26, 2022
EUD General Assembly 2022
EUD’s Project Officer Davy Van Landuyt gave a presentation about the SignON project at the General Assembly of the EUD, where different representations of European National Deaf Associations were present.
Location: Marseille, France
June 1-3, 2022
EAMT2022
At the 23rd annual meeting of the European Association for Machine Translation, the presentation "Sign Language Translation: Ongoing Development, Challenges and Innovations in the SignON Project" was made by leaders of the SignON consortium.
Location: Ghent, Belgium
June 15-17, 2022
NLDB2022
At the 27th International Conference on Applications of Natural Language to Information Systems (NLDB2022) in Valencia, Spain, which took place from 15-17 June, 2022, the presentation "Linguistically Enhanced Text to Sign Gloss Machine Translation" was given by Santiago Egea Gómez, Luis Chiruzzo, Euan McGill and Horacio Saggion.
Location: Valencia, Spain
June 16, 2022
CLIN32
The 32nd Meeting of Computational Linguistics in the Netherlands has a special track on Language technology for Dutch Sign Language (NGT) and Flemish Sign Language (VGT), where five presentations and two posters were given by project partners.
Location: Tilburg, the Netherlands
June 20-25, 2022
LREC2022
At the 13th edition of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, the SignON consortium gave three presentations.
Location: Marseille, France
June 24, 2022
SLTAT2022
At the Seventh International Workshop on Sign Language Translation and Avatar Technology: The Junction of the Visual and the Textual (SLTAT 2022), Ruth M. Holmes, Ellen Rushe, Frank Fowley and Anthony Ventresque gave the presentation “Improving Signer Independent Sign Language Recognition for Low Resource Languages”.
Location: Marseille, France
July 13-15, 2022
ISGS2022
Rachel Moiselle and Lorraine Leeson gave a poster presentation on their scientific publication about depiction as a driver of new terminology in Irish Sign Language in 9th International Society for Gesture Studies in Chicago.
Location: Chicago, United States
28 September, 2021
SignON workshop at the European Parliament
At the invitation of the non-Attached Member of the European Parliament, Ádám Kósa, the SignON project had the opportunity to organise a workshop in the European Parliament on the 28th of September, 2022. We presented the technological advances achieved in the project to date as well as the social benefit and impact on the deaf, hard of hearing and hearing stakeholders.
Location: Brussels, Belgium.
October 16, 2022
LoResMT@COLING2022
COLING 2022 hosted a workshop on machine translation for low resource languages. Work on research done at UPF into rule-based data augmentation strategies as input to transformer-based neural machine translation between Spanish and Spanish Sign Language (LSE) was presented. Paper presented by Euan McGill (UPF)
Location: Online
November 18, 2022
MIDAS Ireland
Professor Lorraine Leeson presented on the topic “Sign of the Times - Technology and Sign Languages”
Location: County Meath, Ireland
January 23-27, 2023
Global Wordnet Conference
A poster on WordNet and SignNet was presented by Ineke Schuurman.
Location: Donostia / San Sebastian, Spain
February 10, 2023
EASIER Conference on Neologisms in Sign Languages
Rachel Moiselle (Trinity College Dublin): presented a poster on her work investigating gesture and depiction in a range of new glossaries of Irish Sign Language and leveraging focus groups for insight into neologisms.
Location: Athens, Greece
February 24, 2023
Conference “Sign Languages on the Island of Ireland: Recognition and Human Rights”
This was an all-Ireland event with speakers and participants invited from both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Coordinated by Professor Lorraine Leeson from the Centre of Deaf Studies in TCD, the conference was hosted by the Royal Irish Academy in conjunction with the Centre for Deaf Studies in Trinity College Dublin and supported by the Irish Deaf Society, the Ulster Society, Bridge Interpreting Ltd., and the SFI ADAPT Centre. This was the first time that the Royal Irish Academy hosted an event focused on sign languages and was the first time that an all-island meeting bringing together researchers, policy makers, community leaders and politicians has taken place. The SignON consortium members Lianne Quigley, Lorraine Leeson and Elizabeth Mathews gave presentations.
Location: Dublin, Ireland
April 20-21, 2023
Language-Identity-Hard-of-Hearing International Conference
The conference was organised in cooperation with European Federation of Hard of Hearing people and was the opportunity to exchange different experiences among the researchers from different fields related to the life and languages of hard-of-hearing people.
Location: Poznań, Poland
April 24-26, 2023
EARMA Conference 2023
The poster “Realising Inclusive Design Through Co-creation” was presented at the EARMA 2023 conference in Prague by Aoife Brady.
Location: Prague, Czech Republic
May 10-12, 2023
NNDR 16 conference
An oral presentation regarding SignNets was given by Ineke Schuurman and Caro Brosens.
Location: Reykjavik, Iceland
May 12, 2023
Colloquium Vlaamse Gebarentaal – KANTL
On 12 May 2023, Lien Soetemans gave a presentation at the “Colloquium Vlaamse Gebarentaal” organised by KANTL (Koninklijke Academie voor Nederlandse Taal en Letteren) titled “Vertaaltechnologie voor gebarentalen: uitdagingen en lessons learned in het SignON project” (Translation technology for signed languages: challenges and lessons learned within the framework of the SignON project).
Location: Ghent, Belgium
May 22, 2023
RESOURCEFUL 2023
A workshop which focused on resources and representations for under-resourced languages and domains.
Location: Tórshavn, Faroe Islands
May 25, 2023
EUD General Assembly 2023
This event addressed the audience of the EUD GA: deaf delegates from around Europe attending the General Assembly as representatives of their National Associations of the Deaf. The event was held in collaboration with the EASIER project, with representatives from both projects presenting different aspects of the technology and co-creation to the audience of deaf leaders from the whole EU. It engaged the audience in discussions and enlightened them on what is going on with regards to sign language technologies, to plant seeds to better prepare deaf representative organisations for their future work.
Location: Stockholm, Sweden
May 30, 2023
ADAPT Annual Scientific Conference 2023
Presented the paper “Towards Accommodating Irish Sign Language Gerunds within the Sign Language Lexicon” at the ADAPT 2023 internal conference (papers presented at the conference will not be published).
Location: Dublin, Ireland
June 2, 2023
Workshop of the Network of Interdisciplinary Translation Studies in the Netherlands and Flanders 2023
NITS is the Network of Interdisciplinary Translation Studies in the Netherlands and Flanders. The aim of the network is for researchers in translation studies and other related disciplines, such as interpreting, machine translation or translation technology, to come together once a year for a one-day conference to present research ideas, ongoing projects or teaching innovations that happen at the intersection of translation studies with other disciplines in this geographical area, and from this platform be able to collaborate further on projects, research and teaching. The following paper was presented: Mirella De Sisto, Vincent Vandeghinste, Dimitar Shterionov, Bram Vanroy, Caro Brosens and Lien Soetemans “Two new parallel datasets of signed and spoken language".<
Location: Leiden, the Netherlands
June 10, 2023
SLTAT 2023
Mathieu De Coster (UGent) presented work on “Querying A Sign Language Dictionary with Videos Using Dense Vector Search” (by Mathieu De Coster and Joni Dambre) at SLTAT 2023, related to evaluating the quality of the SLR models developed in the SignON project.
Lien Soetemans and Myriam Vermeerbergen presented their work on “When (shared) space and time don’t matter. Remote video-mediated (synchronous and asynchronous) communication in Flemish Sign Language” at SLTAT 2023, regarding the potential impact of video-mediated and video-recorded communication on the sign language production of Flemish signers.
Location: Rhodes, Greece
June 12-15, 2023
24th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT 2023)
The following papers were presented: Vincent Vandeghinste, et al., “SignON: Sign Language Translation. Progress and challenges”, and Mirella De Sisto, Vincent Vandeghinste, Lien Soetemans, Caro Brosens and Dimitar Shterionov “GoSt-ParC-Sign: Gold Standard Parallel Corpus of Sign and spoken language”.
Location: Tampere, Finland
June 15, 2023
AT4SSL 2023
The second international workshop on Automatic Translation for Signed and Spoken Languages was collocated with the European conference on Machine Translation (EAMT). It was co-organised by SignON and EASIER. Vincent Vandeghinste (INT) gave a keynote on the challenges with sign language datasets. Sam Bigeard presented joint work with, among others, Irene Murtagh and Ineke Schuurman of SignON on “A Linked Data Approach for linking and aligning Sign Language and Spoken Language data”. Mirella De Sisto presented joint work with Vincent Vandeghinste and Dimitar Shterionov on a new multilingual dataset for the hospitality domain. Euan McGill introduced BSL-Hansard, work done with Horacio Saggion, on a dataset of parliamentary proceedings for English and interpreted British Sign Language. And Zaid Mohammed talked about the position of gerunds in a sign language lexicon, linguistic work together with Irene Murtagh.
Tampere, Finland
June 20, 2023
First Annual Teaching and Research Showcase 2023
Presented the poster “Towards Accommodating Gerunds within the Sign Language Lexicon” within the faculty showcase event.
Location: Dublin, Ireland
June 27, 2023
Cardiff NLP Workshop
Showcasing state-of-the-art research and directions in NLP, also included PhD students' posters (on topics such as Text2Gloss, Gloss2Text and NLP tagging in SLs).
Location: Cardiff, Wales
June 27, 2023
METAFORUM 2023
The NGT-HoReCo corpus was presented by Mirella De Sisto at METAFORUM.
Location: Brussels, Belgium
July 11-15, 2023
XIX World Congress of the World Federation of the Deaf
Mark Wheatley, the EUD Executive Director, gave a presentation, in collaboration with Maartje de Meulder, on the 2023 WFD Congress, titled “Sign Language Machine Translation and Deaf Communities: the case for co-creation” which built on EUD’s experience with co-creation in the SignON project.
Location: Jeju, South Korea
August 16, 2023
Launch of That is the Question
DCU hosted a launch for That is the Question, a short film featuring Lianne Quigley and Alvean Jones that was produced as part of SignON with the support of SFI to engage audiences with sign language machine translation.
Location: Dublin, Ireland
September 13-16, 2023
IBC 2023
IBC is the world's most inspiring content and technology event. It draws together the global media, entertainment and technology industry for a compelling live experience that enables every attendee to gain critical insights, share expertise and unlock business opportunities. During the event, at the Innovation Stage, there was a presentation of a project on digital avatars with sign language. Afterwards we had a long conversation with the people behind the project in which we shared experiences and knowledge.
Location: Amsterdam, The Netherlands
September 18, 2023
Artificial Intelligence for Inclusion and Accessibility
An Introduction to Natural Language Processing for Sign Language Processing in the SignON Project.
Location: Montevideo, Uruguay
September 21, 2023
SLIN 2023
Sign Language in the Netherlands, a small meeting to discuss sign language and SLR, SLT. Attendees were both from inside and outside SignON.
Location: Antwerp, Belgium
September 22, 2023
CLIN33
A poster was presented regarding SignNets by Ineke Schuurman and Caro Brosens, “Automatic Speech Recognition in SignON Project and Beyond” by Aditya Parikh, Louis ten Bosch, Henk van den Heuvel and “ODWN, OMW: issues when dealing with spoken languages, but especially also with sign languages” by Ineke Schuurman, Bram Vanroy, Vincent Vandeghinste, Caro Brosens, Margot Janssens, Thierry Declerck & Sam Bigeard.
Location: Antwerp, Belgium
September 23, 2023
World Deaf Day 2023
As the SignON project approaches its conclusion at the end of 2023, a comprehensive event was organised in the autumn of 2023 with the aim of showcasing the results of the SignON project and mentioning its challenges. For this event, we collaborated with the National Deaf Association in Belgium, Doof Vlaanderen vzw, which hosts World Deaf Day annually on the Saturday of the International Week of the Deaf. This event draws a large audience, primarily composed of deaf sign language users and sign language interpreters. Traditionally, a theme is selected for this event. We proposed to Doof Vlaanderen vzw that the theme for this year be “Sign Language Technology. Jorn Rijckaert, Davy Van Landuyt, Hannes De Durpel and Caro Brosens gave presentations in the morning session. In the afternoon two workshops were organised by Jorn Rijckaert from VGTC.
Location: Bruges, Belgium
September 29, 2023
START / EU Researchers’ Night
This free event, held in Trinity College Dublin, and hosted in partnership with Royal College of Surgeons Ireland and ADAPT, the SFI Research Centre for AI-Driven Digital Content Technology, invited visitors to take an up-close look at the fascinating research that is shaping our world, explore solutions to society’s biggest problems, and learn about cutting-edge thinking through debates, interactive workshops, screenings, a presentation on the SignON project and much more. SignON had a strong presence at the START event in TCD on the 29th of September 2023.
Location: Dublin, Ireland
September 30 – October 1, 2023
Weekend van de Klant 2023 at VRT
During the Weekend van de Klant (Customer Weekend), VRT opened its doors to the general public. Visitors were given a behind-the-scenes tour and discovered how radio and television are made. In the experience room they discovered the process of subtitling and audio description and learned more about virtual avatars and the possibilities to make content more accessible. The importance of sign language was explained to the visitors (mostly hearing ones) and reference was made to the future possibilities that the SignON project can bring.
Location: Brussels, Belgium
October 3, 2023
ACVR
Ruth Holmes (TCD) presented a poster "From Scarcity to Understanding: Transfer Learning for the Extremely Low Resource Irish Sign Language" at the Assistive Computer Vision and Robotics workshop in conjunction with ICCV 2023.
Location: Paris, France
October 4-6, 2023
ESANN 2023
The European Symposium on Artificial Neural Networks is a yearly conference held in Bruges on Machine Learning topics. Mathieu De Coster and Joni Dambre (UGent) co-organised a special session on Machine Learning applied to Sign Language with researchers of the University of Namur (Belgium). Together with Jérôme Fink (UNamur), Mathieu De Coster gave an oral presentation on the challenges of sign language recognition and chaired this special session.
Location: Bruges, Belgium
October 6, 2023
Presentation for MIDI, KU Leuven
Lisa Rombouts presented an overview of the SignON project for the members of MIDI (Research Group Multimodality, Interaction and Discourse) of KU Leuven.
Location: Leuven, Belgium
October 16-18, 2023
CLARIN Annual Conference 2023
Mirella De Sisto presented joint work with Vincent Vandeghinste, Dimitar Shterionov, Lien Soetemans and Caro Brosens on two new parallel corpora of sign and spoken languages, NGT-HoReCo and GoSt-ParC-Sign.
Location: Leuven, Belgium
November 26, 2023
Dag van de wetenschap
Demo of sign language recognition technologies by Mathieu De Coster and Joni Dambre at the "Science Day 2023".
Location: Ghent, Belgium
November 29, 2023
SignON/EASIER Workshop
On the 29th of November 2023, we, SignON, as well as the EASIER project, held a joint workshop at the European Commission to present and discuss the outcomes and outputs of the projects. This one-day event aimed to bring the two teams together and to showcase their innovations and imagine the next steps for sign language translation technologies. It provided a platform for forward-looking interactions between project representatives, end-users, policy makers and industry stakeholders as well as to engage with experts and professionals in policy-making and industry sectors to discuss the outcomes and future prospects of research related to Sign Language in Europe.
Location: Brussels, Belgium
November 21, 2023
SFI Engaged Research Award
The SignON Project was chosen as the winner of the Science Foundation Ireland Engaged Research of the Year 2023 Award. Engaged Research aims to improve, understand, or investigate an issue of public interest or concern including societal challenges and is advanced in collaboration with societal partners. This award recognises the important role of Engaged Research in enabling Science Foundation Ireland-funded research to deliver societal impact for Ireland. Lorraine Leeson (SignON TCD), Lianne Quigley (SignON TCD) and Dave Lewis (Interim Director of the ADAPT Centre) accepted the award on behalf of the SignON Team.
Location: Dublin, Ireland
December 6-7, 2023
WMT Shared task on SLT
This shared task was co-organised by EASIER and SignON members and produced a joint paper on the findings of the shared task.
Location: Singapore
