High quality language data is the foundation of systems that recognize, generate, and translate human language. Technologies for sign languages have lagged behind those for spoken and written language, in large part because sign languages have historically been difficult to label due to the visual nature of the medium and lack of conventional written systems. Even the most well-documented sign languages are considered "low-resource" languages, and in these cases, data quality

How common is a sign? How is it built? Does it look like what it means? ASL-LEX answers those questions for thousands of ASL signs, in one free, searchable place. It started with about 1,000 signs and grew to 2,723, and it has quietly become a foundation for sign language research and technology.

Imagine being able to look up an unfamiliar ASL sign by simply demonstrating it to your device. Whether you're a fluent signer or just beginning to learn, this type of interaction could transform accessibility in technology—think of ASL-compatible assistants like Siri or Alexa or search engines that understand signed queries. This vision is one step closer to reality thanks to the ASL Citizen dataset, a collaborative project we worked on with Microsoft Research, University of

A dataset to train computers to recognize isolated signs.