Improving Handshape Representations for Sign Language Processing: A Graph Neural Network Approach

Handshapes serve a fundamental phonological role in signed languages, with American Sign Language employing approximately 50 distinct shapes. However, computational approaches rarely model handshapes explicitly, limiting both recognition accuracy and linguistic analysis. We introduce a novel graph neural network that separates temporal dynamics from static handshape configurations. Our approach combines anatomicallyinformed graph structures with contrastive learning to address key challenges in handshape recognition, including subtle inter-class distinctions and temporal variations. We establish the first benchmark for structured handshape recognition in signing sequences, achieving 46% accuracy across 37 handshape classes (with baseline methods achieving 25%).