Rakuten's Participation in WAT 2021: Examining the Effectiveness of Pre-trained Models for Multilingual and Multimodal Machine Translation

This paper introduces our neural machine translation systems' participation in the WAT 2021 shared translation tasks (team ID: sakura). We participated in the (i) NICT-SAP, (ii) Japanese-English multimodal translation, (iii) Multilingual Indic, and (iv) Myanmar-English translation tasks. Multilingual approaches such as mBART (Liu et al., 2020) are capable of pre-training a complete, multilingual sequence-to-sequence model through denoising objectives, making it a great starting point for building multilingual translation systems. Our main focus in this work is to investigate the effectiveness of multilingual finetuning on such a multilingual language model on various translation tasks, including low-resource, multimodal, and mixed-domain translation. We further explore a multimodal approach based on universal visual representation (Zhang et al., 2019) and compare its performance against a unimodal approach based on mBART alone.

The Effectiveness of an Interactive Multiplicate Program Designed by PowerPoint in Science Teaching for Students in The Second Grade

This research aims to investigate the effectiveness of a computer program designed by PowerPoint to teach second grade's students science. It also aims to promote the principle of the integration of technology in education , in addition to showing how to use computer software in teaching science. The sample of the research consisted of (100) students from the second grade , and it was divided into two groups : an experimental group consisted of (50) students who will be taught by using the computer program, and a control group consisted of (50) students who will be taught by the usual methods. The research tools were a pre-post test and a computer program designed by PowerPoint that deals with several issues of second grade's science. And the results were as follows : 1- The effectiveness of the computer program in teaching science, where the results of the experimental group -that were taught by using the computer program- were higher than the results of the control group -that were taught by the usual ways. 2- There is no effect of the students' genus in their results after learning with the computer program . 3- The results of the rural students were higher than the city students ones , after using the computer program in teaching.