SignTrace: Describe a Sign, Find the Word

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. It comes from a paper posted to arXiv on 28 September 2026. 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. 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.

Why it counts

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. Dictionary-derived wording and prior selection within the benchmark limit generalization to descriptions independently produced by users.

Sources

Primary source: primary source

What is not known

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