Japanese Predicate Conjugation for Neural Machine Translation

Michiki Kurosawa, Yukio Matsumura, Hayahide Yamagishi, Mamoru Komachi

Abstract
Neural machine translation (NMT) has a drawback in that can generate only high-frequency words owing to the computational costs of the softmax function in the output layer. In Japanese-English NMT, Japanese predicate conjugation causes an increase in vocabulary size. For example, one verb can have as many as 19 surface varieties. In this research, we focus on predicate conjugation for compressing the vocabulary size in Japanese. The vocabulary list is filled with the various forms of verbs. We propose methods using predicate conjugation information without discarding linguistic information. The proposed methods can generate low-frequency words and deal with unknown words. Two methods were considered to introduce conjugation information: the first considers it as a token (conjugation token) and the second considers it as an embedded vector (conjugation feature). The results using these methods demonstrate that the vocabulary size can be compressed by approximately 86.1% (Tanaka corpus) and the NMT models can output the words not in the training data set. Furthermore, BLEU scores improved by 0.91 points in Japanese-to-English translation, and 0.32 points in English-to-Japanese translation with ASPEC.
Anthology ID:
N18-4014
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop
Month:
June
Year:
2018
Address:
New Orleans, Louisiana, USA
Editors:
Silvio Ricardo Cordeiro, Shereen Oraby, Umashanthi Pavalanathan, Kyeongmin Rim
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
100–105
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N18-4014
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N18-4014
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Michiki Kurosawa, Yukio Matsumura, Hayahide Yamagishi, and Mamoru Komachi. 2018. Japanese Predicate Conjugation for Neural Machine Translation. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop, pages 100–105, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Japanese Predicate Conjugation for Neural Machine Translation (Kurosawa et al., NAACL 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-bitext-workshop/N18-4014.pdf
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