Illinois Japanese English News Translation for WMT 2021

Giang Le, Shinka Mori, Lane Schwartz


Abstract
This system paper describes an end-to-end NMT pipeline for the Japanese English news translation task as submitted to WMT 2021, where we explore the efficacy of techniques such as tokenizing with language-independent and language-dependent tokenizers, normalizing by orthographic conversion, creating a politeness-and-formality-aware model by implementing a tagger, back-translation, model ensembling, and n-best reranking. We use parallel corpora provided by WMT 2021 organizers for training, and development and test data from WMT 2020 for evaluation of different experiment models. The preprocessed corpora are trained with a Transformer neural network model. We found that combining various techniques described herein, such as language-independent BPE tokenization, incorporating politeness and formality tags, model ensembling, n-best reranking, and back-translation produced the best translation models relative to other experiment systems.
Anthology ID:
2021.wmt-1.11
Volume:
Proceedings of the Sixth Conference on Machine Translation
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Loic Barrault, Ondrej Bojar, Fethi Bougares, Rajen Chatterjee, Marta R. Costa-jussa, Christian Federmann, Mark Fishel, Alexander Fraser, Markus Freitag, Yvette Graham, Roman Grundkiewicz, Paco Guzman, Barry Haddow, Matthias Huck, Antonio Jimeno Yepes, Philipp Koehn, Tom Kocmi, Andre Martins, Makoto Morishita, Christof Monz
Venue:
WMT
SIG:
SIGMT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
144–153
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.wmt-1.11
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Giang Le, Shinka Mori, and Lane Schwartz. 2021. Illinois Japanese ↔ English News Translation for WMT 2021. In Proceedings of the Sixth Conference on Machine Translation, pages 144–153, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Illinois Japanese ↔ English News Translation for WMT 2021 (Le et al., WMT 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.wmt-1.11.pdf
Data
WMT 2020