Yusuke Sakai


2022

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NAIST-NICT-TIT WMT22 General MT Task Submission
Hiroyuki Deguchi | Kenji Imamura | Masahiro Kaneko | Yuto Nishida | Yusuke Sakai | Justin Vasselli | Huy Hien Vu | Taro Watanabe
Proceedings of the Seventh Conference on Machine Translation (WMT)

In this paper, we describe our NAIST-NICT-TIT submission to the WMT22 general machine translation task. We participated in this task for the English ↔ Japanese language pair.Our system is characterized as an ensemble of Transformer big models, k-nearest-neighbor machine translation (kNN-MT) (Khandelwal et al., 2021), and reranking.In our translation system, we construct the datastore for kNN-MT from back-translated monolingual data and integrate kNN-MT into the ensemble model. We designed a reranking system to select a translation from the n-best translation candidates generated by the translation system. We also use a context-aware model to improve the document-level consistency of the translation.

2021

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Transliteration for Low-Resource Code-Switching Texts: Building an Automatic Cyrillic-to-Latin Converter for Tatar
Chihiro Taguchi | Yusuke Sakai | Taro Watanabe
Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Computational Approaches to Linguistic Code-Switching

We introduce a Cyrillic-to-Latin transliterator for the Tatar language based on subword-level language identification. The transliteration is a challenging task due to the following two reasons. First, because modern Tatar texts often contain intra-word code-switching to Russian, a different transliteration set of rules needs to be applied to each morpheme depending on the language, which necessitates morpheme-level language identification. Second, the fact that Tatar is a low-resource language, with most of the texts in Cyrillic, makes it difficult to prepare a sufficient dataset. Given this situation, we proposed a transliteration method based on subword-level language identification. We trained a language classifier with monolingual Tatar and Russian texts, and applied different transliteration rules in accord with the identified language. The results demonstrate that our proposed method outscores other Tatar transliteration tools, and imply that it correctly transcribes Russian loanwords to some extent.