arXiv subjects

Makoto Morishita

Publications and source records attributed to Makoto Morishita.

22 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2020

JParaCrawl: A Large Scale Web-Based English-Japanese Parallel Corpus

Recent machine translation algorithms mainly rely on parallel corpora. However, since the availability of parallel corpora remains limited, only some resource-rich language pairs can benefit from them. We constructed a parallel corpus for English-Japanese, for which the amount of publicly available parallel corpora is still limited. We constructed the parallel corpus by broadly crawling the web and automatically aligning parallel sentences. Our collected corpus, called JParaCrawl, amassed over 8.7 million sentence pairs. We show how it includes a broader range of domains and how a neural machine translation model trained with it works as a good pre-trained model for fine-tuning specific domains. The pre-training and fine-tuning approaches achieved or surpassed performance comparable to model training from the initial state and reduced the training time. Additionally, we trained the model with an in-domain dataset and JParaCrawl to show how we achieved the best performance with them. JParaCrawl and the pre-trained models are freely available online for research purposes.

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arXiv2019

NTT's Machine Translation Systems for WMT19 Robustness Task

This paper describes NTT's submission to the WMT19 robustness task. This task mainly focuses on translating noisy text (e.g., posts on Twitter), which presents different difficulties from typical translation tasks such as news. Our submission combined techniques including utilization of a synthetic corpus, domain adaptation, and a placeholder mechanism, which significantly improved over the previous baseline. Experimental results revealed the placeholder mechanism, which temporarily replaces the non-standard tokens including emojis and emoticons with special placeholder tokens during translation, improves translation accuracy even with noisy texts.

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arXiv2017

An Empirical Study of Mini-Batch Creation Strategies for Neural Machine Translation

Training of neural machine translation (NMT) models usually uses mini-batches for efficiency purposes. During the mini-batched training process, it is necessary to pad shorter sentences in a mini-batch to be equal in length to the longest sentence therein for efficient computation. Previous work has noted that sorting the corpus based on the sentence length before making mini-batches reduces the amount of padding and increases the processing speed. However, despite the fact that mini-batch creation is an essential step in NMT training, widely used NMT toolkits implement disparate strategies for doing so, which have not been empirically validated or compared. This work investigates mini-batch creation strategies with experiments over two different datasets. Our results suggest that the choice of a mini-batch creation strategy has a large effect on NMT training and some length-based sorting strategies do not always work well compared with simple shuffling.

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arXiv2015

Neural Reranking Improves Subjective Quality of Machine Translation: NAIST at WAT2015

This year, the Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST)'s submission to the 2015 Workshop on Asian Translation was based on syntax-based statistical machine translation, with the addition of a reranking component using neural attentional machine translation models. Experiments re-confirmed results from previous work stating that neural MT reranking provides a large gain in objective evaluation measures such as BLEU, and also confirmed for the first time that these results also carry over to manual evaluation. We further perform a detailed analysis of reasons for this increase, finding that the main contributions of the neural models lie in improvement of the grammatical correctness of the output, as opposed to improvements in lexical choice of content words.

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