Spoken-Written Japanese Conversion for Japanese-English University-Lecture Translation

Abstract

In machine translation of spoken language, it is known that phenomena specific to spoken language have a negative impact on translation accuracy. Therefore, in this study, as a preprocessing step for Japanese-English translation in our university lecture translation system, we improve the translation accuracy by automatically converting spoken-style Japanese texts to written-style. First, we create a corpus consisting of Japanese transcriptions of university lectures, their conversions into written language, and the corresponding English texts. Next, we train spoken-written conversion models and Japanese-English translation models using the corpus. As a result, we show that spoken-written Japanese conversion improves the accuracy of Japanese-English translation. In addition, we quantify which phenomena affect translation accuracy and to what extent.