Tomoharu Iwata


2021

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Context-aware Neural Machine Translation with Mini-batch Embedding
Makoto Morishita | Jun Suzuki | Tomoharu Iwata | Masaaki Nagata
Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume

It is crucial to provide an inter-sentence context in Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models for higher-quality translation. With the aim of using a simple approach to incorporate inter-sentence information, we propose mini-batch embedding (MBE) as a way to represent the features of sentences in a mini-batch. We construct a mini-batch by choosing sentences from the same document, and thus the MBE is expected to have contextual information across sentences. Here, we incorporate MBE in an NMT model, and our experiments show that the proposed method consistently outperforms the translation capabilities of strong baselines and improves writing style or terminology to fit the document’s context.

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Learning Contextualised Cross-lingual Word Embeddings and Alignments for Extremely Low-Resource Languages Using Parallel Corpora
Takashi Wada | Tomoharu Iwata | Yuji Matsumoto | Timothy Baldwin | Jey Han Lau
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Multilingual Representation Learning

We propose a new approach for learning contextualised cross-lingual word embeddings based on a small parallel corpus (e.g. a few hundred sentence pairs). Our method obtains word embeddings via an LSTM encoder-decoder model that simultaneously translates and reconstructs an input sentence. Through sharing model parameters among different languages, our model jointly trains the word embeddings in a common cross-lingual space. We also propose to combine word and subword embeddings to make use of orthographic similarities across different languages. We base our experiments on real-world data from endangered languages, namely Yongning Na, Shipibo-Konibo, and Griko. Our experiments on bilingual lexicon induction and word alignment tasks show that our model outperforms existing methods by a large margin for most language pairs. These results demonstrate that, contrary to common belief, an encoder-decoder translation model is beneficial for learning cross-lingual representations even in extremely low-resource conditions. Furthermore, our model also works well on high-resource conditions, achieving state-of-the-art performance on a German-English word-alignment task.

2019

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Unsupervised Multilingual Word Embedding with Limited Resources using Neural Language Models
Takashi Wada | Tomoharu Iwata | Yuji Matsumoto
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Recently, a variety of unsupervised methods have been proposed that map pre-trained word embeddings of different languages into the same space without any parallel data. These methods aim to find a linear transformation based on the assumption that monolingual word embeddings are approximately isomorphic between languages. However, it has been demonstrated that this assumption holds true only on specific conditions, and with limited resources, the performance of these methods decreases drastically. To overcome this problem, we propose a new unsupervised multilingual embedding method that does not rely on such assumption and performs well under resource-poor scenarios, namely when only a small amount of monolingual data (i.e., 50k sentences) are available, or when the domains of monolingual data are different across languages. Our proposed model, which we call ‘Multilingual Neural Language Models’, shares some of the network parameters among multiple languages, and encodes sentences of multiple languages into the same space. The model jointly learns word embeddings of different languages in the same space, and generates multilingual embeddings without any parallel data or pre-training. Our experiments on word alignment tasks have demonstrated that, on the low-resource condition, our model substantially outperforms existing unsupervised and even supervised methods trained with 500 bilingual pairs of words. Our model also outperforms unsupervised methods given different-domain corpora across languages. Our code is publicly available.

2013

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Latent Semantic Matching: Application to Cross-language Text Categorization without Alignment Information
Tsutomu Hirao | Tomoharu Iwata | Masaaki Nagata
Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

2011

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Alignment Inference and Bayesian Adaptation for Machine Translation
Kevin Duh | Katsuhito Sudoh | Tomoharu Iwata | Hajime Tsukada
Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XIII: Papers

2010

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Learning Common Grammar from Multilingual Corpus
Tomoharu Iwata | Daichi Mochihashi | Hiroshi Sawada
Proceedings of the ACL 2010 Conference Short Papers