Seiji Okura


2011

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UTX 1.11, a Simple and Open User Dictionary/Terminology Standard, and its Effectiveness with Multiple MT Systems
Seiji Okura | Yuji Yamamoto | Hajime Ito | Michael Kato | Miwako Shimazu
Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XIII: Papers

2008

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Sharing User Dictionaries Across Multiple Systems with UTX-S
Francis Bond | Seiji Okura | Yuji Yamamoto | Toshiki Murata | Kiyotaka Uchimoto | Michael Kato | Miwako Shimazu | Tsugiyoshi Suzuki
Proceedings of the 8th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas: Government and Commercial Uses of MT

Careful tuning of user-created dictionaries is indispensable when using a machine translation system for computer aided translation. However, there is no widely used standard for user dictionaries in the Japanese/English machine translation market. To address this issue, AAMT (the Asia-Pacific Association for Machine Translation) has established a specification of sharable dictionaries (UTX-S: Universal Terminology eXchange -- Simple), which can be used across different machine translation systems, thus increasing the interoperability of language resources. UTX-S is simpler than existing specifications such as UPF and OLIF. It was explicitly designed to make it easy to (a) add new user dictionaries and (b) share existing user dictionaries. This facilitates rapid user dictionary production and avoids vendor tie in. In this study we describe the UTX-Simple (UTX-S) format, and show that it can be converted to the user dictionary formats for five commercial English-Japanese MT systems. We then present a case study where we (a) convert an on-line glossary to UTX-S, and (b) produce user dictionaries for five different systems, and then exchange them. The results show that the simplified format of UTX-S can be used to rapidly build dictionaries. Further, we confirm that customized user dictionaries are effective across systems, although with a slight loss in quality: on average, user dictionaries improved the translations for 44.8% of translations with the systems they were built for and 37.3% of translations for different systems. In ongoing work, AAMT is using UTX-S as the format in building up a user community for producing, sharing, and accumulating user dictionaries in a sustainable way.