We introduce our TMU Japanese-to-English system, which employs a semi-autoregressive model, to tackle the WAT 2021 restricted translation task. In this task, we translate an input sentence with the constraint that some words, called restricted target vocabularies (RTVs), must be contained in the output sentence. To satisfy this constraint, we use a semi-autoregressive model, namely, RecoverSAT, due to its ability (known as “forced translation”) to insert specified words into the output sentence. When using “forced translation,” the order of inserting RTVs is a critical problem. In this work, we aligned the source sentence and the corresponding RTVs using GIZA++. In our system, we obtain word alignment between a source sentence and the corresponding RTVs and then sort the RTVs in the order of their corresponding words or phrases in the source sentence. Using the model with sorted order RTVs, we succeeded in inserting all the RTVs into output sentences in more than 96% of the test sentences. Moreover, we confirmed that sorting RTVs improved the BLEU score compared with random order RTVs.

Recently, neural machine translation is widely used for its high translation accuracy, but it is also known to show poor performance at long sentence translation. Besides, this tendency appears prominently for low resource languages. We assume that these problems are caused by long sentences being few in the train data. Therefore, we propose a data augmentation method for handling long sentences. Our method is simple; we only use given parallel corpora as train data and generate long sentences by concatenating two sentences. Based on our experiments, we confirm improvements in long sentence translation by proposed data augmentation despite the simplicity. Moreover, the proposed method improves translation quality more when combined with back-translation.