State-of-the-art sign language translation (SLT) systems facilitate the learning process through gloss annotations, either in an end2end manner or by involving an intermediate step. Unfortunately, gloss labelled sign language data is usually not available at scale and, when available, gloss annotations widely differ from dataset to dataset. We present a novel approach using sentence embeddings of the target sentences at training time that take the role of glosses. The new kind of supervision does not need any manual annotation but it is learned on raw textual data. As our approach easily facilitates multilinguality, we evaluate it on datasets covering German (PHOENIX-2014T) and American (How2Sign) sign languages and experiment with mono- and multilingual sentence embeddings and translation systems. Our approach significantly outperforms other gloss-free approaches, setting the new state-of-the-art for data sets where glosses are not available and when no additional SLT datasets are used for pretraining, diminishing the gap between gloss-free and gloss-dependent systems.

Motivated by applications in various scientific fields having demand of predicting relationship between higher-order (tensor) feature and univariate response, we propose a \underline{S}parse and \underline{L}ow-rank \underline{T}ensor \underline{R}egression model (SLTR). This model enforces sparsity and low-rankness of the tensor coefficient by directly applying $\ell_1$ norm and tensor nuclear norm on it respectively, such that (1) the structural information of tensor is preserved and (2) the data interpretation is convenient. To make the solving procedure scalable and efficient, SLTR makes use of the proximal gradient method to optimize two norm regularizers, which can be easily implemented parallelly. Additionally, a tighter convergence rate is proved over three-order tensor data. We evaluate SLTR on several simulated datasets and one fMRI dataset. Experiment results show that, compared with previous models, SLTR is able to obtain a solution no worse than others with much less time cost.