Atsushi Fujita


2023

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Designing a Metalanguage of Differences Between Translations: A Case Study for English-to-Japanese Translation
Tomono Honda | Atsushi Fujita | Mayuka Yamamoto | Kyo Kageura
Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Human Evaluation of NLP Systems

In both the translation industry and translation education, analytic and systematic assessment of translations plays a vital role. However, due to lack of a scheme for describing differences between translations, such assessment has been realized only in an ad-hoc manner. There is prior work on a scheme for describing differences between translations, but it has coverage and objectivity issues. To alleviate these issues and realize more fine-grained analyses, we developed an improved scheme by referring to diverse types of translations and adopting hierarchical linguistic units for analysis, taking English-to-Japanese translation as an example.

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Mitigating Domain Mismatch in Machine Translation via Paraphrasing
Hyuga Koretaka | Tomoyuki Kajiwara | Atsushi Fujita | Takashi Ninomiya
Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Asian Translation

Quality of machine translation (MT) deteriorates significantly when translating texts having characteristics that differ from the training data, such as content domain. Although previous studies have focused on adapting MT models on a bilingual parallel corpus in the target domain, this approach is not applicable when no parallel data are available for the target domain or when utilizing black-box MT systems. To mitigate problems caused by such domain mismatch without relying on any corpus in the target domain, this study proposes a method to search for better translations by paraphrasing input texts of MT. To obtain better translations even for input texts from unforeknown domains, we generate their multiple paraphrases, translate each, and rerank the resulting translations to select the most likely one. Experimental results on Japanese-to-English translation reveal that the proposed method improves translation quality in terms of BLEU score for input texts from specific domains.

2021

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Understanding Pre-Editing for Black-Box Neural Machine Translation
Rei Miyata | Atsushi Fujita
Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume

Pre-editing is the process of modifying the source text (ST) so that it can be translated by machine translation (MT) in a better quality. Despite the unpredictability of black-box neural MT (NMT), pre-editing has been deployed in various practical MT use cases. Although many studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of pre-editing methods for particular settings, thus far, a deep understanding of what pre-editing is and how it works for black-box NMT is lacking. To elicit such understanding, we extensively investigated human pre-editing practices. We first implemented a protocol to incrementally record the minimum edits for each ST and collected 6,652 instances of pre-editing across three translation directions, two MT systems, and four text domains. We then analysed the instances from three perspectives: the characteristics of the pre-edited ST, the diversity of pre-editing operations, and the impact of the pre-editing operations on NMT outputs. Our findings include the following: (1) enhancing the explicitness of the meaning of an ST and its syntactic structure is more important for obtaining better translations than making the ST shorter and simpler, and (2) although the impact of pre-editing on NMT is generally unpredictable, there are some tendencies of changes in the NMT outputs depending on the editing operation types.

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NICT Kyoto Submission for the WMT’21 Quality Estimation Task: Multimetric Multilingual Pretraining for Critical Error Detection
Raphael Rubino | Atsushi Fujita | Benjamin Marie
Proceedings of the Sixth Conference on Machine Translation

This paper presents the NICT Kyoto submission for the WMT’21 Quality Estimation (QE) Critical Error Detection shared task (Task 3). Our approach relies mainly on QE model pretraining for which we used 11 language pairs, three sentence-level and three word-level translation quality metrics. Starting from an XLM-R checkpoint, we perform continued training by modifying the learning objective, switching from masked language modeling to QE oriented signals, before finetuning and ensembling the models. Results obtained on the test set in terms of correlation coefficient and F-score show that automatic metrics and synthetic data perform well for pretraining, with our submissions ranked first for two out of four language pairs. A deeper look at the impact of each metric on the downstream task indicates higher performance for token oriented metrics, while an ablation study emphasizes the usefulness of conducting both self-supervised and QE pretraining.

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Scientific Credibility of Machine Translation Research: A Meta-Evaluation of 769 Papers
Benjamin Marie | Atsushi Fujita | Raphael Rubino
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

This paper presents the first large-scale meta-evaluation of machine translation (MT). We annotated MT evaluations conducted in 769 research papers published from 2010 to 2020. Our study shows that practices for automatic MT evaluation have dramatically changed during the past decade and follow concerning trends. An increasing number of MT evaluations exclusively rely on differences between BLEU scores to draw conclusions, without performing any kind of statistical significance testing nor human evaluation, while at least 108 metrics claiming to be better than BLEU have been proposed. MT evaluations in recent papers tend to copy and compare automatic metric scores from previous work to claim the superiority of a method or an algorithm without confirming neither exactly the same training, validating, and testing data have been used nor the metric scores are comparable. Furthermore, tools for reporting standardized metric scores are still far from being widely adopted by the MT community. After showing how the accumulation of these pitfalls leads to dubious evaluation, we propose a guideline to encourage better automatic MT evaluation along with a simple meta-evaluation scoring method to assess its credibility.

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Investigating Softmax Tempering for Training Neural Machine Translation Models
Raj Dabre | Atsushi Fujita
Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XVIII: Research Track

Neural machine translation (NMT) models are typically trained using a softmax cross-entropy loss where the softmax distribution is compared against the gold labels. In low-resource scenarios and NMT models tend to perform poorly because the model training quickly converges to a point where the softmax distribution computed using logits approaches the gold label distribution. Although label smoothing is a well-known solution to address this issue and we further propose to divide the logits by a temperature coefficient greater than one and forcing the softmax distribution to be smoother during training. This makes it harder for the model to quickly over-fit. In our experiments on 11 language pairs in the low-resource Asian Language Treebank dataset and we observed significant improvements in translation quality. Our analysis focuses on finding the right balance of label smoothing and softmax tempering which indicates that they are orthogonal methods. Finally and a study of softmax entropies and gradients reveal the impact of our method on the internal behavior of our NMT models.

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Attainable Text-to-Text Machine Translation vs. Translation: Issues Beyond Linguistic Processing
Atsushi Fujita
Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XVIII: Research Track

Existing approaches for machine translation (MT) mostly translate given text in the source language into the target language and without explicitly referring to information indispensable for producing proper translation. This includes not only information in other textual elements and modalities than texts in the same document and but also extra-document and non-linguistic information and such as norms and skopos. To design better translation production work-flows and we need to distinguish translation issues that could be resolved by the existing text-to-text approaches and those beyond them. To this end and we conducted an analytic assessment of MT outputs and taking an English-to-Japanese news translation task as a case study. First and examples of translation issues and their revisions were collected by a two-stage post-editing (PE) method: performing minimal PE to obtain translation attainable based on the given textual information and further performing full PE to obtain truly acceptable translation referring to any information if necessary. Then and the collected revision examples were manually analyzed. We revealed dominant issues and information indispensable for resolving them and such as fine-grained style specifications and terminology and domain-specific knowledge and and reference documents and delineating a clear distinction between translation and what text-to-text MT can ultimately attain.

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Error Identification for Machine Translation with Metric Embedding and Attention
Raphael Rubino | Atsushi Fujita | Benjamin Marie
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Evaluation and Comparison of NLP Systems

Quality Estimation (QE) for Machine Translation has been shown to reach relatively high accuracy in predicting sentence-level scores, relying on pretrained contextual embeddings and human-produced quality scores. However, the lack of explanations along with decisions made by end-to-end neural models makes the results difficult to interpret. Furthermore, word-level annotated datasets are rare due to the prohibitive effort required to perform this task, while they could provide interpretable signals in addition to sentence-level QE outputs. In this paper, we propose a novel QE architecture which tackles both the word-level data scarcity and the interpretability limitations of recent approaches. Sentence-level and word-level components are jointly pretrained through an attention mechanism based on synthetic data and a set of MT metrics embedded in a common space. Our approach is evaluated on the Eval4NLP 2021 shared task and our submissions reach the first position in all language pairs. The extraction of metric-to-input attention weights show that different metrics focus on different parts of the source and target text, providing strong rationales in the decision-making process of the QE model.

2020

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Coursera Corpus Mining and Multistage Fine-Tuning for Improving Lectures Translation
Haiyue Song | Raj Dabre | Atsushi Fujita | Sadao Kurohashi
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

Lectures translation is a case of spoken language translation and there is a lack of publicly available parallel corpora for this purpose. To address this, we examine a framework for parallel corpus mining which is a quick and effective way to mine a parallel corpus from publicly available lectures at Coursera. Our approach determines sentence alignments, relying on machine translation and cosine similarity over continuous-space sentence representations. We also show how to use the resulting corpora in a multistage fine-tuning based domain adaptation for high-quality lectures translation. For Japanese–English lectures translation, we extracted parallel data of approximately 40,000 lines and created development and test sets through manual filtering for benchmarking translation performance. We demonstrate that the mined corpus greatly enhances the quality of translation when used in conjunction with out-of-domain parallel corpora via multistage training. This paper also suggests some guidelines to gather and clean corpora, mine parallel sentences, address noise in the mined data, and create high-quality evaluation splits. For the sake of reproducibility, we have released our code for parallel data creation.

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Synthesizing Parallel Data of User-Generated Texts with Zero-Shot Neural Machine Translation
Benjamin Marie | Atsushi Fujita
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 8

Neural machine translation (NMT) systems are usually trained on clean parallel data. They can perform very well for translating clean in-domain texts. However, as demonstrated by previous work, the translation quality significantly worsens when translating noisy texts, such as user-generated texts (UGT) from online social media. Given the lack of parallel data of UGT that can be used to train or adapt NMT systems, we synthesize parallel data of UGT, exploiting monolingual data of UGT through crosslingual language model pre-training and zero-shot NMT systems. This paper presents two different but complementary approaches: One alters given clean parallel data into UGT-like parallel data whereas the other generates translations from monolingual data of UGT. On the MTNT translation tasks, we show that our synthesized parallel data can lead to better NMT systems for UGT while making them more robust in translating texts from various domains and styles.

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Tagged Back-translation Revisited: Why Does It Really Work?
Benjamin Marie | Raphael Rubino | Atsushi Fujita
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

In this paper, we show that neural machine translation (NMT) systems trained on large back-translated data overfit some of the characteristics of machine-translated texts. Such NMT systems better translate human-produced translations, i.e., translationese, but may largely worsen the translation quality of original texts. Our analysis reveals that adding a simple tag to back-translations prevents this quality degradation and improves on average the overall translation quality by helping the NMT system to distinguish back-translated data from original parallel data during training. We also show that, in contrast to high-resource configurations, NMT systems trained in low-resource settings are much less vulnerable to overfit back-translations. We conclude that the back-translations in the training data should always be tagged especially when the origin of the text to be translated is unknown.

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Balancing Cost and Benefit with Tied-Multi Transformers
Raj Dabre | Raphael Rubino | Atsushi Fujita
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Neural Generation and Translation

We propose a novel procedure for training multiple Transformers with tied parameters which compresses multiple models into one enabling the dynamic choice of the number of encoder and decoder layers during decoding. In training an encoder-decoder model, typically, the output of the last layer of the N-layer encoder is fed to the M-layer decoder, and the output of the last decoder layer is used to compute loss. Instead, our method computes a single loss consisting of NxM losses, where each loss is computed from the output of one of the M decoder layers connected to one of the N encoder layers. Such a model subsumes NxM models with different number of encoder and decoder layers, and can be used for decoding with fewer than the maximum number of encoder and decoder layers. Given our flexible tied model, we also address to a-priori selection of the number of encoder and decoder layers for faster decoding, and explore recurrent stacking of layers and knowledge distillation for model compression. We present a cost-benefit analysis of applying the proposed approaches for neural machine translation and show that they reduce decoding costs while preserving translation quality.

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Combination of Neural Machine Translation Systems at WMT20
Benjamin Marie | Raphael Rubino | Atsushi Fujita
Proceedings of the Fifth Conference on Machine Translation

This paper presents neural machine translation systems and their combination built for the WMT20 English-Polish and Japanese->English translation tasks. We show that using a Transformer Big architecture, additional training data synthesized from monolingual data, and combining many NMT systems through n-best list reranking improve translation quality. However, while we observed such improvements on the validation data, we did not observed similar improvements on the test data. Our analysis reveals that the presence of translationese texts in the validation data led us to take decisions in building NMT systems that were not optimal to obtain the best results on the test data.

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Combining Sequence Distillation and Transfer Learning for Efficient Low-Resource Neural Machine Translation Models
Raj Dabre | Atsushi Fujita
Proceedings of the Fifth Conference on Machine Translation

In neural machine translation (NMT), sequence distillation (SD) through creation of distilled corpora leads to efficient (compact and fast) models. However, its effectiveness in extremely low-resource (ELR) settings has not been well-studied. On the other hand, transfer learning (TL) by leveraging larger helping corpora greatly improves translation quality in general. This paper investigates a combination of SD and TL for training efficient NMT models for ELR settings, where we utilize TL with helping corpora twice: once for distilling the ELR corpora and then during compact model training. We experimented with two ELR settings: Vietnamese–English and Hindi–English from the Asian Language Treebank dataset with 18k training sentence pairs. Using the compact models with 40% smaller parameters trained on the distilled ELR corpora, greedy search achieved 3.6 BLEU points improvement in average while reducing 40% of decoding time. We also confirmed that using both the distilled ELR and helping corpora in the second round of TL further improves translation quality. Our work highlights the importance of stage-wise application of SD and TL for efficient NMT modeling for ELR settings.

2019

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Unsupervised Joint Training of Bilingual Word Embeddings
Benjamin Marie | Atsushi Fujita
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

State-of-the-art methods for unsupervised bilingual word embeddings (BWE) train a mapping function that maps pre-trained monolingual word embeddings into a bilingual space. Despite its remarkable results, unsupervised mapping is also well-known to be limited by the original dissimilarity between the word embedding spaces to be mapped. In this work, we propose a new approach that trains unsupervised BWE jointly on synthetic parallel data generated through unsupervised machine translation. We demonstrate that existing algorithms that jointly train BWE are very robust to noisy training data and show that unsupervised BWE jointly trained significantly outperform unsupervised mapped BWE in several cross-lingual NLP tasks.

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Unsupervised Extraction of Partial Translations for Neural Machine Translation
Benjamin Marie | Atsushi Fujita
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)

In neural machine translation (NMT), monolingual data are usually exploited through a so-called back-translation: sentences in the target language are translated into the source language to synthesize new parallel data. While this method provides more training data to better model the target language, on the source side, it only exploits translations that the NMT system is already able to generate using a model trained on existing parallel data. In this work, we assume that new translation knowledge can be extracted from monolingual data, without relying at all on existing parallel data. We propose a new algorithm for extracting from monolingual data what we call partial translations: pairs of source and target sentences that contain sequences of tokens that are translations of each other. Our algorithm is fully unsupervised and takes only source and target monolingual data as input. Our empirical evaluation points out that our partial translations can be used in combination with back-translation to further improve NMT models. Furthermore, while partial translations are particularly useful for low-resource language pairs, they can also be successfully exploited in resource-rich scenarios to improve translation quality.

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Exploiting Multilingualism through Multistage Fine-Tuning for Low-Resource Neural Machine Translation
Raj Dabre | Atsushi Fujita | Chenhui Chu
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

This paper highlights the impressive utility of multi-parallel corpora for transfer learning in a one-to-many low-resource neural machine translation (NMT) setting. We report on a systematic comparison of multistage fine-tuning configurations, consisting of (1) pre-training on an external large (209k–440k) parallel corpus for English and a helping target language, (2) mixed pre-training or fine-tuning on a mixture of the external and low-resource (18k) target parallel corpora, and (3) pure fine-tuning on the target parallel corpora. Our experiments confirm that multi-parallel corpora are extremely useful despite their scarcity and content-wise redundancy thus exhibiting the true power of multilingualism. Even when the helping target language is not one of the target languages of our concern, our multistage fine-tuning can give 3–9 BLEU score gains over a simple one-to-one model.

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Supervised and Unsupervised Machine Translation for Myanmar-English and Khmer-English
Benjamin Marie | Hour Kaing | Aye Myat Mon | Chenchen Ding | Atsushi Fujita | Masao Utiyama | Eiichiro Sumita
Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Asian Translation

This paper presents the NICT’s supervised and unsupervised machine translation systems for the WAT2019 Myanmar-English and Khmer-English translation tasks. For all the translation directions, we built state-of-the-art supervised neural (NMT) and statistical (SMT) machine translation systems, using monolingual data cleaned and normalized. Our combination of NMT and SMT performed among the best systems for the four translation directions. We also investigated the feasibility of unsupervised machine translation for low-resource and distant language pairs and confirmed observations of previous work showing that unsupervised MT is still largely unable to deal with them.

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NICT’s Supervised Neural Machine Translation Systems for the WMT19 News Translation Task
Raj Dabre | Kehai Chen | Benjamin Marie | Rui Wang | Atsushi Fujita | Masao Utiyama | Eiichiro Sumita
Proceedings of the Fourth Conference on Machine Translation (Volume 2: Shared Task Papers, Day 1)

In this paper, we describe our supervised neural machine translation (NMT) systems that we developed for the news translation task for Kazakh↔English, Gujarati↔English, Chinese↔English, and English→Finnish translation directions. We focused on leveraging multilingual transfer learning and back-translation for the extremely low-resource language pairs: Kazakh↔English and Gujarati↔English translation. For the Chinese↔English translation, we used the provided parallel data augmented with a large quantity of back-translated monolingual data to train state-of-the-art NMT systems. We then employed techniques that have been proven to be most effective, such as back-translation, fine-tuning, and model ensembling, to generate the primary submissions of Chinese↔English. For English→Finnish, our submission from WMT18 remains a strong baseline despite the increase in parallel corpora for this year’s task.

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NICT’s Unsupervised Neural and Statistical Machine Translation Systems for the WMT19 News Translation Task
Benjamin Marie | Haipeng Sun | Rui Wang | Kehai Chen | Atsushi Fujita | Masao Utiyama | Eiichiro Sumita
Proceedings of the Fourth Conference on Machine Translation (Volume 2: Shared Task Papers, Day 1)

This paper presents the NICT’s participation in the WMT19 unsupervised news translation task. We participated in the unsupervised translation direction: German-Czech. Our primary submission to the task is the result of a simple combination of our unsupervised neural and statistical machine translation systems. Our system is ranked first for the German-to-Czech translation task, using only the data provided by the organizers (“constraint’”), according to both BLEU-cased and human evaluation. We also performed contrastive experiments with other language pairs, namely, English-Gujarati and English-Kazakh, to better assess the effectiveness of unsupervised machine translation in for distant language pairs and in truly low-resource conditions.

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NICT’s Machine Translation Systems for the WMT19 Similar Language Translation Task
Benjamin Marie | Raj Dabre | Atsushi Fujita
Proceedings of the Fourth Conference on Machine Translation (Volume 3: Shared Task Papers, Day 2)

This paper presents the NICT’s participation in the WMT19 shared Similar Language Translation Task. We participated in the Spanish-Portuguese task. For both translation directions, we prepared state-of-the-art statistical (SMT) and neural (NMT) machine translation systems. Our NMT systems with the Transformer architecture were trained on the provided parallel data enlarged with a large quantity of back-translated monolingual data. Our primary submission to the task is the result of a simple combination of our SMT and NMT systems. According to BLEU, our systems were ranked second and third respectively for the Portuguese-to-Spanish and Spanish-to-Portuguese translation directions. For contrastive experiments, we also submitted outputs generated with an unsupervised SMT system.

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Exploiting Out-of-Domain Parallel Data through Multilingual Transfer Learning for Low-Resource Neural Machine Translation
Aizhan Imankulova | Raj Dabre | Atsushi Fujita | Kenji Imamura
Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XVII: Research Track

2018

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A Smorgasbord of Features to Combine Phrase-Based and Neural Machine Translation
Benjamin Marie | Atsushi Fujita
Proceedings of the 13th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas (Volume 1: Research Track)

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Enhancement of Encoder and Attention Using Target Monolingual Corpora in Neural Machine Translation
Kenji Imamura | Atsushi Fujita | Eiichiro Sumita
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Neural Machine Translation and Generation

A large-scale parallel corpus is required to train encoder-decoder neural machine translation. The method of using synthetic parallel texts, in which target monolingual corpora are automatically translated into source sentences, is effective in improving the decoder, but is unreliable for enhancing the encoder. In this paper, we propose a method that enhances the encoder and attention using target monolingual corpora by generating multiple source sentences via sampling. By using multiple source sentences, diversity close to that of humans is achieved. Our experimental results show that the translation quality is improved by increasing the number of synthetic source sentences for each given target sentence, and quality close to that using a manually created parallel corpus was achieved.

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NICT’s Neural and Statistical Machine Translation Systems for the WMT18 News Translation Task
Benjamin Marie | Rui Wang | Atsushi Fujita | Masao Utiyama | Eiichiro Sumita
Proceedings of the Third Conference on Machine Translation: Shared Task Papers

This paper presents the NICT’s participation to the WMT18 shared news translation task. We participated in the eight translation directions of four language pairs: Estonian-English, Finnish-English, Turkish-English and Chinese-English. For each translation direction, we prepared state-of-the-art statistical (SMT) and neural (NMT) machine translation systems. Our NMT systems were trained with the transformer architecture using the provided parallel data enlarged with a large quantity of back-translated monolingual data that we generated with a new incremental training framework. Our primary submissions to the task are the result of a simple combination of our SMT and NMT systems. Our systems are ranked first for the Estonian-English and Finnish-English language pairs (constraint) according to BLEU-cased.

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NICT’s Participation in WAT 2018: Approaches Using Multilingualism and Recurrently Stacked Layers
Raj Dabre | Anoop Kunchukuttan | Atsushi Fujita | Eiichiro Sumita
Proceedings of the 32nd Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation: 5th Workshop on Asian Translation: 5th Workshop on Asian Translation

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Combination of Statistical and Neural Machine Translation for Myanmar-English
Benjamin Marie | Atsushi Fujita | Eiichiro Sumita
Proceedings of the 32nd Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation: 5th Workshop on Asian Translation: 5th Workshop on Asian Translation

2017

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Consistent Classification of Translation Revisions: A Case Study of English-Japanese Student Translations
Atsushi Fujita | Kikuko Tanabe | Chiho Toyoshima | Mayuka Yamamoto | Kyo Kageura | Anthony Hartley
Proceedings of the 11th Linguistic Annotation Workshop

Consistency is a crucial requirement in text annotation. It is especially important in educational applications, as lack of consistency directly affects learners’ motivation and learning performance. This paper presents a quality assessment scheme for English-to-Japanese translations produced by learner translators at university. We constructed a revision typology and a decision tree manually through an application of the OntoNotes method, i.e., an iteration of assessing learners’ translations and hypothesizing the conditions for consistent decision making, as well as re-organizing the typology. Intrinsic evaluation of the created scheme confirmed its potential contribution to the consistent classification of identified erroneous text spans, achieving visibly higher Cohen’s kappa values, up to 0.831, than previous work. This paper also describes an application of our scheme to an English-to-Japanese translation exercise course for undergraduate students at a university in Japan.

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Japanese to English/Chinese/Korean Datasets for Translation Quality Estimation and Automatic Post-Editing
Atsushi Fujita | Eiichiro Sumita
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Asian Translation (WAT2017)

Aiming at facilitating the research on quality estimation (QE) and automatic post-editing (APE) of machine translation (MT) outputs, especially for those among Asian languages, we have created new datasets for Japanese to English, Chinese, and Korean translations. As the source text, actual utterances in Japanese were extracted from the log data of our speech translation service. MT outputs were then given by phrase-based statistical MT systems. Finally, human evaluators were employed to grade the quality of MT outputs and to post-edit them. This paper describes the characteristics of the created datasets and reports on our benchmarking experiments on word-level QE, sentence-level QE, and APE conducted using the created datasets.

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Efficient Extraction of Pseudo-Parallel Sentences from Raw Monolingual Data Using Word Embeddings
Benjamin Marie | Atsushi Fujita
Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

We propose a new method for extracting pseudo-parallel sentences from a pair of large monolingual corpora, without relying on any document-level information. Our method first exploits word embeddings in order to efficiently evaluate trillions of candidate sentence pairs and then a classifier to find the most reliable ones. We report significant improvements in domain adaptation for statistical machine translation when using a translation model trained on the sentence pairs extracted from in-domain monolingual corpora.

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Semantic Features Based on Word Alignments for Estimating Quality of Text Simplification
Tomoyuki Kajiwara | Atsushi Fujita
Proceedings of the Eighth International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers)

This paper examines the usefulness of semantic features based on word alignments for estimating the quality of text simplification. Specifically, we introduce seven types of alignment-based features computed on the basis of word embeddings and paraphrase lexicons. Through an empirical experiment using the QATS dataset, we confirm that we can achieve the state-of-the-art performance only with these features.

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Phrase Table Induction Using In-Domain Monolingual Data for Domain Adaptation in Statistical Machine Translation
Benjamin Marie | Atsushi Fujita
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 5

We present a new framework to induce an in-domain phrase table from in-domain monolingual data that can be used to adapt a general-domain statistical machine translation system to the targeted domain. Our method first compiles sets of phrases in source and target languages separately and generates candidate phrase pairs by taking the Cartesian product of the two phrase sets. It then computes inexpensive features for each candidate phrase pair and filters them using a supervised classifier in order to induce an in-domain phrase table. We experimented on the language pair English–French, both translation directions, in two domains and obtained consistently better results than a strong baseline system that uses an in-domain bilingual lexicon. We also conducted an error analysis that showed the induced phrase tables proposed useful translations, especially for words and phrases unseen in the parallel data used to train the general-domain baseline system.

2015

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Expanding Paraphrase Lexicons by Exploiting Lexical Variants
Atsushi Fujita | Pierre Isabelle
Proceedings of the 2015 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

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Patent claim translation based on sublanguage-specific sentence structure
Masaru Fuji | Atsushi Fujita | Masao Utiyama | Eiichiro Sumita | Yuji Matsumoto
Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XV: Papers

2012

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A Poor Man’s Translation Memory Using Machine Translation Evaluation Metrics
Michel Simard | Atsushi Fujita
Proceedings of the 10th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas: Research Papers

We propose straightforward implementations of translation memory (TM) functionality for research purposes, using machine translation evaluation metrics as similarity functions. Experiments under various conditions demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach, but also highlight problems in evaluating the results using an MT evaluation methodology.

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Enlarging Paraphrase Collections through Generalization and Instantiation
Atsushi Fujita | Pierre Isabelle | Roland Kuhn
Proceedings of the 2012 Joint Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and Computational Natural Language Learning

2010

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A Thesaurus of Predicate-Argument Structure for Japanese Verbs to Deal with Granularity of Verb Meanings
Koichi Takeuchi | Kentaro Inui | Nao Takeuchi | Atsushi Fujita
Proceedings of the Eighth Workshop on Asian Language Resouces

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Using Various Features in Machine Learning to Obtain High Levels of Performance for Recognition of Japanese Notational Variants
Masahiro Kojima | Masaki Murata | Jun’ichi Kazama | Kow Kuroda | Atsushi Fujita | Eiji Aramaki | Masaaki Tsuchida | Yasuhiko Watanabe | Kentaro Torisawa
Proceedings of the 24th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation

2008

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Computing Paraphrasability of Syntactic Variants Using Web Snippets
Atsushi Fujita | Satoshi Sato
Proceedings of the Third International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing: Volume-I

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A Probabilistic Model for Measuring Grammaticality and Similarity of Automatically Generated Paraphrases of Predicate Phrases
Atsushi Fujita | Satoshi Sato
Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Computational Linguistics (Coling 2008)

2007

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A Compositional Approach toward Dynamic Phrasal Thesaurus
Atsushi Fujita | Shuhei Kato | Naoki Kato | Satoshi Sato
Proceedings of the ACL-PASCAL Workshop on Textual Entailment and Paraphrasing

2006

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Augmenting a Semantic Verb Lexicon with a Large Scale Collection of Example Sentences
Kentaro Inui | Toru Hirano | Ryu Iida | Atsushi Fujita | Yuji Matsumoto
Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’06)

One of the crucial issues in semantic parsing is how to reduce costs of collecting a sufficiently large amount of labeled data. This paper presents a new approach to cost-saving annotation of example sentences with predicate-argument structure information, taking Japanese as a target language. In this scheme, a large collection of unlabeled examples are first clustered and selectively sampled, and for each sampled cluster, only one representative example is given a label by a human annotator. The advantages of this approach are empirically supported by the results of our preliminary experiments, where we use an existing similarity function and naive sampling strategy.

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Adjective-to-Verb Paraphrasing in Japanese Based on Lexical Constraints of Verbs
Atsushi Fujita | Naruaki Masuno | Satoshi Sato | Takehito Utsuro
Proceedings of the Fourth International Natural Language Generation Conference

2005

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Exploiting Lexical Conceptual Structure for Paraphrase Generation
Atsushi Fujita | Kentaro Inui | Yuji Matsumoto
Second International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing: Full Papers

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A Class-oriented Approach to Building a Paraphrase Corpus
Atsushi Fujita | Kentaro Inui
Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Paraphrasing (IWP2005)

2004

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Paraphrasing of Japanese Light-verb Constructions Based on Lexical Conceptual Structure
Atsushi Fujita | Kentaro Furihata | Kentaro Inui | Yuji Matsumoto | Koichi Takeuchi
Proceedings of the Workshop on Multiword Expressions: Integrating Processing

2003

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Text Simplification for Reading Assistance: A Project Note
Kentaro Inui | Atsushi Fujita | Tetsuro Takahashi | Ryu Iida | Tomoya Iwakura
Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Paraphrasing