{"ID":22952705,"CreatedAt":"2026-09-17T02:12:05.498442134Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-09-20T18:11:56.143995915Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.18772","arxiv_id":"2609.18772","title":"Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Recognition of Sign Language Handshapes","abstract":"Sign language processing advances rapidly for high-resource languages such as American Sign Language (ASL), yet most of the world's sign languages lack the phonological annotations new methods require. We present the first zero-shot cross-lingual framework for handshape recognition, transferring from ASL to Catalan Sign Language (LSC). Our approach leverages the decomposition of handshapes into five phonological features -- selected fingers, flexion, spread, thumb position, and thumb contact -- shared across both languages, to decode LSC handshapes from predicted features via a composite phonological distance metric. We evaluate three architectures (MLP, SL-GCN, SHuBERT) trained on two ASL corpora (PopSign, Sem-Lex) against a 37-handshape, single-signer LSC benchmark. Zero-shot transfer proves viable once recording-format disparities are harmonized, reaching 80.0% phonological feature accuracy and 54.5% expected handshape accuracy. Phonological decomposition thus offers a bridge for extending sign language technologies to low-resource languages without any target-language video training labels.","short_abstract":"Sign language processing advances rapidly for high-resource languages such as American Sign Language (ASL), yet most of the world's sign languages lack the phonological annotations new methods require. We present the first zero-shot cross-lingual framework for handshape recognition, transferring from ASL to Catalan Sig...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.18772","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2609.18772v1","authors":"[\"Marcel Granero-Moya\",\"Carolina del Corral Farrarós\",\"Gloria Haro\",\"Coloma Ballester\",\"Ricardo Marques\"]","published":"2026-09-16T14:56:51Z","proceeding":"cs.CL","tasks":"[\"cs.CL\",\"cs.CV\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}