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Sign Language Systems
Foundations of SLRTG

What Counts as a Sign Language System?

Before metrics and models, we need a clear definition of the system boundary.

By JeffPublished February 2, 2026Updated February 18, 20261 min readvideo

A common failure in sign language AI conversations is treating the model as the whole system.

In practice, a sign language system includes:

  1. data collection choices
  2. annotation policy
  3. model objective
  4. user-facing interface
  5. escalation path when things fail

If we only optimize model accuracy, we optimize the wrong layer.

A useful first principle is to make the system boundary explicit before discussing quality.

Diagram Demo

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System boundary diagramSVG diagram loaded from /public with caption text.

Sign Language Systems logoPNG image loaded from /public.

References

  1. Padden, C., & Humphries, T. (2005). Inside Deaf Culture. Harvard University Press.

  2. National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. "American Sign Language." NIDCD, 2024. Accessed March 14, 2026.

    https://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/american-sign-language

  3. Camgoz, N. C., Koller, O., Hadfield, S., & Bowden, R. (2020). Sign Language Transformers: Joint End-to-End Sign Language Recognition and Translation. Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition.

    https://openaccess.thecvf.com/content_CVPR_2020/html/Camgoz_Sign_Language_Transformers_Joint_End-to-End_Sign_Language_Recognition_and_Translation_CVPR_2020_paper.html