SignTrace: Describe a Sign, Find the Word

Abstract:Identifying an unfamiliar sign is difficult when a learner remembers its movement but does not know its meaning or formal feature codes. SignTrace addresses this longstanding reverse-lookup problem through natural-language access to a Chinese sign-language dictionary. The system integrates LLM-based dictionary enrichment, action extraction, dictionary-style rewriting, seven-channel retrieval, and candidate reranking over 6,699 entries. It has been deployed for user trials and has received positive informal feedback. Evaluation on a dictionary-derived benchmark of 500 movement-description queries yields 94.0% Hit@1, 97.4% Hit@9, and a mean reciprocal rank of 0.9540. Reranking increases Hit@1 from 71.8% to 94.0%, while component analyses show the contribution of enriched entry descriptions. Median query-processing time is 13.37 seconds with six concurrent queries. By connecting everyday movement descriptions to documented signs and meanings, SignTrace provides a practical tool for identifying unfamiliar signs. Dictionary-derived wording and prior selection within the benchmark limit generalization to descriptions independently produced by users.

Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Information Retrieval (cs.IR)

arXiv:2609.30295 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2609.30295v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.30295 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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