Neural machine translation (NMT) cannot handle a larger vocabulary because the training complexity and decoding complexity proportionally increase with the number of target words. This problem becomes even more serious when translating patent documents, which contain many technical terms that are observed infrequently. Long et al.(2017) proposed to select phrases that contain out-of-vocabulary words using the statistical approach of branching entropy. The selected phrases are then replaced with tokens during training and post-translated by the phrase translation table of SMT. In this paper, we apply the method proposed by Long et al. (2017) to the WAT 2017 Japanese-Chinese and Japanese-English patent datasets. Evaluation on Japanese-to-Chinese, Chinese-to-Japanese, Japanese-to-English and English-to-Japanese patent sentence translation proved the effectiveness of phrases selected with branching entropy, where the NMT model of Long et al.(2017) achieves a substantial improvement over a baseline NMT model without the technique proposed by Long et al.(2017).

Neural machine translation (NMT), a new approach to machine translation, has achieved promising results comparable to those of traditional approaches such as statistical machine translation (SMT). Despite its recent success, NMT cannot handle a larger vocabulary because training complexity and decoding complexity proportionally increase with the number of target words. This problem becomes even more serious when translating patent documents, which contain many technical terms that are observed infrequently. In NMTs, words that are out of vocabulary are represented by a single unknown token. In this paper, we propose a method that enables NMT to translate patent sentences comprising a large vocabulary of technical terms. We train an NMT system on bilingual data wherein technical terms are replaced with technical term tokens; this allows it to translate most of the source sentences except technical terms. Further, we use it as a decoder to translate source sentences with technical term tokens and replace the tokens with technical term translations using SMT. We also use it to rerank the 1,000-best SMT translations on the basis of the average of the SMT score and that of the NMT rescoring of the translated sentences with technical term tokens. Our experiments on Japanese-Chinese patent sentences show that the proposed NMT system achieves a substantial improvement of up to 3.1 BLEU points and 2.3 RIBES points over traditional SMT systems and an improvement of approximately 0.6 BLEU points and 0.8 RIBES points over an equivalent NMT system without our proposed technique.

In this paper, we propose structure transformation rules for statistical machine translation which are lexicalized by only function words. Although such rules can be extracted from an aligned parallel corpus simply as original phrase pairs, their structure is hierarchical and thus can be used in a hierarchical translation system. In addition, structure transformation rules can take into account long-distance reordering, allowing for more than two phrases to be moved simultaneously. The rule set is used as a core module in our hierarchical model together with two other modules, namely, a basic reordering module and an optional gap phrase module. Our model is considerably more compact and produces slightly higher BLEU scores than the original hierarchical phrase-based model in Japanese-English translation on the parallel corpus of the NTCIR-7 patent translation task.

In aiming at research and development on machine translation, we produced a test collection for Japanese-English machine translation in the seventh NTCIR Workshop. This paper describes details of our test collection. From patent documents published in Japan and the United States, we extracted patent families as a parallel corpus. A patent family is a set of patent documents for the same or related invention and these documents are usually filed to more than one country in different languages. In the parallel corpus, we aligned Japanese sentences with their counterpart English sentences. Our test collection, which includes approximately 2,000,000 sentence pairs, can be used to train and test machine translation systems. Our test collection also includes search topics for cross-lingual patent retrieval and the contribution of machine translation to a patent retrieval task can also be evaluated. Our test collection will be available to the public for research purposes after the NTCIR final meeting.

This paper proposes a new method of the sentiment analysis utilizing inter-sentence structures especially for coping with reversal phenomenon of word polarity such as quotation of other’s opinions on an opposite side. We model these phenomenon using Hidden Conditional Random Fields(HCRFs) with three kinds of features: transition features, polarity features and reversal (of polarity) features. Polarity features and reversal features are doubly added to each word, and each weight of the features are trained by the common structure of positive and negative corpus in, for example, assuming that reversal phenomenon occured for the same reason (features) in both polarity corpus. Our method achieved better accuracy than the Naive Bayes method and as good as SVMs.

To aid research and development in machine translation, we have produced a test collection for Japanese/English machine translation. To obtain a parallel corpus, we extracted patent documents for the same or related inventions published in Japan and the United States. Our test collection includes approximately 2000000 sentence pairs in Japanese and English, which were extracted automatically from our parallel corpus. These sentence pairs can be used to train and evaluate machine translation systems. Our test collection also includes search topics for cross-lingual patent retrieval, which can be used to evaluate the contribution of machine translation to retrieving patent documents across languages. This paper describes our test collection, methods for evaluating machine translation, and preliminary experiments.

This paper presents an attempt at developing a technique of acquiring translation pairs of technical terms with sufficiently high precision from parallel patent documents. The approach taken in the proposed technique is based on integrating the phrase translation table of a state-of-the-art statistical phrase-based machine translation model, and compositional translation generation based on an existing bilingual lexicon for human use. Our evaluation results clearly show that the agreement between the two individual techniques definitely contribute to improving precision of translation candidates. We then apply the Support Vector Machines (SVMs) to the task of automatically validating translation candidates in the phrase translation table. Experimental evaluation results again show that the SVMs based approach to translation candidates validation can contribute to improving the precision of translation candidates in the phrase translation table.