Field Experiments of Real Time Foreign News Distribution Powered by MT

Keiji Yasuda, Ichiro Yamada, Naoaki Okazaki, Hideki Tanaka, Hidehiro Asaka, Takeshi Anzai, Fumiaki Sugaya


Abstract
Field experiments on a foreign news distribution system using two key technologies are reported. The first technology is a summarization component, which is used for generating news headlines. This component is a transformer-based abstractive text summarization system which is trained to output headlines from the leading sentences of news articles. The second technology is machine translation (MT), which enables users to read foreign news articles in their mother language. Since the system uses MT, users can immediately access the latest foreign news. 139 Japanese LINE users participated in the field experiments for two weeks, viewing about 40,000 articles which had been translated from English to Japanese. We carried out surveys both during and after the experiments. According to the results, 79.3% of users evaluated the headlines as adequate, while 74.7% of users evaluated the automatically translated articles as intelligible. According to the post-experiment survey, 59.7% of users wished to continue using the system; 11.5% of users did not. We also report several statistics of the experiments.
Anthology ID:
2021.mtsummit-up.17
Volume:
Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XVIII: Users and Providers Track
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Virtual
Editors:
Janice Campbell, Ben Huyck, Stephen Larocca, Jay Marciano, Konstantin Savenkov, Alex Yanishevsky
Venue:
MTSummit
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Machine Translation in the Americas
Note:
Pages:
227–232
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.mtsummit-up.17
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Keiji Yasuda, Ichiro Yamada, Naoaki Okazaki, Hideki Tanaka, Hidehiro Asaka, Takeshi Anzai, and Fumiaki Sugaya. 2021. Field Experiments of Real Time Foreign News Distribution Powered by MT. In Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XVIII: Users and Providers Track, pages 227–232, Virtual. Association for Machine Translation in the Americas.
Cite (Informal):
Field Experiments of Real Time Foreign News Distribution Powered by MT (Yasuda et al., MTSummit 2021)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.mtsummit-up.17.pdf