Shonosuke Ishiwatari


2024

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Utilizing Longer Context than Speech Bubbles in Automated Manga Translation
Hiroto Kaino | Soichiro Sugihara | Tomoyuki Kajiwara | Takashi Ninomiya | Joshua B. Tanner | Shonosuke Ishiwatari
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)

This paper focuses on improving the performance of machine translation for manga (Japanese-style comics). In manga machine translation, text consists of a sequence of speech bubbles and each speech bubble is translated individually. However, each speech bubble itself does not contain sufficient information for translation. Therefore, previous work has proposed methods to use contextual information, such as the previous speech bubble, speech bubbles within the same scene, and corresponding scene images. In this research, we propose two new approaches to capture broader contextual information. Our first approach involves scene-based translation that considers the previous scene. The second approach considers broader context information, including details about the work, author, and manga genre. Through our experiments, we confirm that each of our methods improves translation quality, with the combination of both methods achieving the highest quality. Additionally, detailed analysis reveals the effect of zero-anaphora resolution in translation, such as supplying missing subjects not mentioned within a scene, highlighting the usefulness of longer contextual information in manga machine translation.

2019

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Learning to Describe Unknown Phrases with Local and Global Contexts
Shonosuke Ishiwatari | Hiroaki Hayashi | Naoki Yoshinaga | Graham Neubig | Shoetsu Sato | Masashi Toyoda | Masaru Kitsuregawa
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)

When reading a text, it is common to become stuck on unfamiliar words and phrases, such as polysemous words with novel senses, rarely used idioms, internet slang, or emerging entities. If we humans cannot figure out the meaning of those expressions from the immediate local context, we consult dictionaries for definitions or search documents or the web to find other global context to help in interpretation. Can machines help us do this work? Which type of context is more important for machines to solve the problem? To answer these questions, we undertake a task of describing a given phrase in natural language based on its local and global contexts. To solve this task, we propose a neural description model that consists of two context encoders and a description decoder. In contrast to the existing methods for non-standard English explanation [Ni+ 2017] and definition generation [Noraset+ 2017; Gadetsky+ 2018], our model appropriately takes important clues from both local and global contexts. Experimental results on three existing datasets (including WordNet, Oxford and Urban Dictionaries) and a dataset newly created from Wikipedia demonstrate the effectiveness of our method over previous work.

2017

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A Bag of Useful Tricks for Practical Neural Machine Translation: Embedding Layer Initialization and Large Batch Size
Masato Neishi | Jin Sakuma | Satoshi Tohda | Shonosuke Ishiwatari | Naoki Yoshinaga | Masashi Toyoda
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Asian Translation (WAT2017)

In this paper, we describe the team UT-IIS’s system and results for the WAT 2017 translation tasks. We further investigated several tricks including a novel technique for initializing embedding layers using only the parallel corpus, which increased the BLEU score by 1.28, found a practical large batch size of 256, and gained insights regarding hyperparameter settings. Ultimately, our system obtained a better result than the state-of-the-art system of WAT 2016. Our code is available on https://github.com/nem6ishi/wat17.

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Chunk-based Decoder for Neural Machine Translation
Shonosuke Ishiwatari | Jingtao Yao | Shujie Liu | Mu Li | Ming Zhou | Naoki Yoshinaga | Masaru Kitsuregawa | Weijia Jia
Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Chunks (or phrases) once played a pivotal role in machine translation. By using a chunk rather than a word as the basic translation unit, local (intra-chunk) and global (inter-chunk) word orders and dependencies can be easily modeled. The chunk structure, despite its importance, has not been considered in the decoders used for neural machine translation (NMT). In this paper, we propose chunk-based decoders for (NMT), each of which consists of a chunk-level decoder and a word-level decoder. The chunk-level decoder models global dependencies while the word-level decoder decides the local word order in a chunk. To output a target sentence, the chunk-level decoder generates a chunk representation containing global information, which the word-level decoder then uses as a basis to predict the words inside the chunk. Experimental results show that our proposed decoders can significantly improve translation performance in a WAT ‘16 English-to-Japanese translation task.

2015

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Accurate Cross-lingual Projection between Count-based Word Vectors by Exploiting Translatable Context Pairs
Shonosuke Ishiwatari | Nobuhiro Kaji | Naoki Yoshinaga | Masashi Toyoda | Masaru Kitsuregawa
Proceedings of the Nineteenth Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning