The Importance of Including Signed Languages in Natural Language Processing

The field of Natural Language processing (NLP) has seen significant breakthroughs in the past few years, predominately for spoken language systems. By contrast, NLP models for signed languages have lagged behind, in part due to a lack of involvement from the NLP community, limited resources, and the need for multimodal systems. In this chapter, we discuss the current state of the field, the challenges posed by representing signed languages, and existing methods and resources for doing so. We highlight open research problems in the field and discuss best practices, and emphasize the need for deaf collaboration when conducting signed language research.