Overview of the First Workshop on Sign Language Processing (WSLP 2025)

AbstractWe organized the First Workshop on Sign Language Processing (WSLP 2025), co-located with IJCNLP–AACL 2025 at IIT Bombay, to bring together researchers, linguists, and members of the Deaf community and accelerate computational work on under-resourced sign languages.The workshop accepted ten papers—including two official shared-task submissions—that introduced new large-scale resources (a continuous ISL fingerspelling corpus, cross-lingual HamNoSys corpora), advanced multilingual and motion-aware translation models, explored LLM-based augmentation and glossing strategies, and presented lightweight deployable systems for regional languages such as Odia.We ran a three-track shared task on Indian Sign Language that attracted over sixty registered teams and established the first public leaderboards for sentence-level ISL-to-English translation, isolated word recognition, and word-presence prediction.By centring geographic, linguistic, and organiser diversity, releasing open datasets and benchmarks, and explicitly addressing linguistic challenges unique to visual–spatial languages, we significantly broadened the scope of sign-language processing beyond traditionally dominant European and East-Asian datasets, laying a robust foundation for inclusive, equitable, and deployable sign-language AI in the Global South.