Continuous Sign Language

Sign language produced in natural, flowing sentences and discourse, as opposed to isolated individual signs. Continuous sign language includes phenomena like co-articulation (where one sign influences the formation of the next), epenthesis (insertion of transitional movements between signs), and prosodic features that only emerge in connected speech. Most existing sign language datasets contain only isolated signs with their English glosses, but continuous sign language data — complete sentences with annotations — is essential for developing practical sign language recognition and translation technologies that can handle real-world conversation. Collecting and labeling continuous sign language data is significantly more expensive and complex than collecting isolated signs.