Multimodal neural machine translation (NMT) has become an increasingly important area of research over the years because additional modalities, such as image data, can provide more context to textual data. Furthermore, the viability of training multi
modal NMT models without a large parallel corpus continues to be investigated due to low availability of parallel sentences with images, particularly for English-Japanese data. However, this void can be filled with comparable sentences that contain bilingual terms and parallel phrases, which are naturally created through media such as social network posts and e-commerce product descriptions. In this paper, we propose a new multimodal English-Japanese corpus with comparable sentences that are compiled from existing image captioning datasets. In addition, we supplement our comparable sentences with a smaller parallel corpus for validation and test purposes. To test the performance of this comparable sentence translation scenario, we train several baseline NMT models with our comparable corpus and evaluate their English-Japanese translation performance. Due to low translation scores in our baseline experiments, we believe that current multimodal NMT models are not designed to effectively utilize comparable sentence data. Despite this, we hope for our corpus to be used to further research into multimodal NMT with comparable sentences.
Lexically cohesive translations preserve consistency in word choices in document-level translation. We employ a copy mechanism into a context-aware neural machine translation model to allow copying words from previous translation outputs. Different f
rom previous context-aware neural machine translation models that handle all the discourse phenomena implicitly, our model explicitly addresses the lexical cohesion problem by boosting the probabilities to output words consistently. We conduct experiments on Japanese to English translation using an evaluation dataset for discourse translation. The results showed that the proposed model significantly improved lexical cohesion compared to previous context-aware models.
A semantic equivalence assessment is defined as a task that assesses semantic equivalence in a sentence pair by binary judgment (i.e., paraphrase identification) or grading (i.e., semantic textual similarity measurement). It constitutes a set of task
s crucial for research on natural language understanding. Recently, BERT realized a breakthrough in sentence representation learning (Devlin et al., 2019), which is broadly transferable to various NLP tasks. While BERTs performance improves by increasing its model size, the required computational power is an obstacle preventing practical applications from adopting the technology. Herein, we propose to inject phrasal paraphrase relations into BERT in order to generate suitable representations for semantic equivalence assessment instead of increasing the model size. Experiments on standard natural language understanding tasks confirm that our method effectively improves a smaller BERT model while maintaining the model size. The generated model exhibits superior performance compared to a larger BERT model on semantic equivalence assessment tasks. Furthermore, it achieves larger performance gains on tasks with limited training datasets for fine-tuning, which is a property desirable for transfer learning.
The word order between source and target languages significantly influences the translation quality in machine translation. Preordering can effectively address this problem. Previous preordering methods require a manual feature design, making languag
e dependent design costly. In this paper, we propose a preordering method with a recursive neural network that learns features from raw inputs. Experiments show that the proposed method achieves comparable gain in translation quality to the state-of-the-art method but without a manual feature design.
The frequency of a web search keyword generally reflects the degree of public interest in a particular subject matter. Search logs are therefore useful resources for trend analysis. However, access to search logs is typically restricted to search eng
ine providers. In this paper, we investigate whether search frequency can be estimated from a different resource such as Wikipedia page views of open data. We found frequently searched keywords to have remarkably high correlations with Wikipedia page views. This suggests that Wikipedia page views can be an effective tool for determining popular global web search trends.
