Akiko Sakamoto


2013

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Development of a Simultaneous Interpretation System for Face-to-Face Services and Its Evaluation Experiment in Real Situation
Akiko Sakamoto | Nayuko Watanabe | Satoshi Kamatani | Kazuo Sumita
Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XIV: Papers

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Evaluation of a simultaneous interpretation system and analysis of speech log for user experience assessment
Akiko Sakamoto | Kazuhiko Abe | Kazuo Sumita | Satoshi Kamatani
Proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation: Papers

This paper focuses on the user experience (UX) of a simultaneous interpretation system for face-to-face conversation between two users. To assess the UX of the system, we first made a transcript of the speech of users recorded during a task-based evaluation experiment and then analyzed user speech from the viewpoint of UX. In a task-based evaluation experiment, 44 tasks out of 45 tasks were solved. The solved task ratio was 97.8%. This indicates that the system can effectively provide interpretation to enable users to solve tasks. However, we found that users repeated speech due to errors in automatic speech recognition (ASR) or machine translation (MT). Users repeated clauses 1.8 times on average. Users seemed to repeat themselves until they received a response from their partner users. In addition, we found that after approximately 3.6 repetitions, users would change their words to avoid errors in ASR or MT and to evoke a response from their partner users.

2010

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Utilizing Semantic Equivalence Classes of Japanese Functional Expressions in Translation Rule Acquisition from Parallel Patent Sentences
Taiji Nagasaka | Ran Shimanouchi | Akiko Sakamoto | Takafumi Suzuki | Yohei Morishita | Takehito Utsuro | Suguru Matsuyoshi
Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10)

In the ``Sandglass'' MT architecture, we identify the class of monosemous Japanese functional expressions and utilize it in the task of translating Japanese functional expressions into English. We employ the semantic equivalence classes of a recently compiled large scale hierarchical lexicon of Japanese functional expressions. We then study whether functional expressions within a class can be translated into a single canonical English expression. Based on the results of identifying monosemous semantic equivalence classes, this paper studies how to extract rules for translating functional expressions in Japanese patent documents into English. In this study, we use about 1.8M Japanese-English parallel sentences automatically extracted from Japanese-English patent families, which are distributed through the Patent Translation Task at the NTCIR-7 Workshop. Then, as a toolkit of a phrase-based SMT (Statistical Machine Translation) model, Moses is applied and Japanese-English translation pairs are obtained in the form of a phrase translation table. Finally, we extract translation pairs of Japanese functional expressions from the phrase translation table. Through this study, we found that most of the semantic equivalence classes judged as monosemous based on manual translation into English have only one translation rules even in the patent domain.

2009

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Identifying and Utilizing the Class of Monosemous Japanese Functional Expressions in Machine Translation
Akiko Sakamoto | Taiji Nagasaka | Takehito Utsuro | Suguru Matsuyoshi
Proceedings of the 23rd Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation, Volume 2