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While the progress of machine translation of written text has come far in the past several years thanks to the increasing availability of parallel corpora and corpora-based training technologies, automatic translation of spoken text and dialogues remains challenging even for modern systems. In this paper, we aim to boost the machine translation quality of conversational texts by introducing a newly constructed Japanese-English business conversation parallel corpus. A detailed analysis of the corpus is provided along with challenging examples for automatic translation. We also experiment with adding the corpus in a machine translation training scenario and show how the resulting system benefits from its use.

For Japanese-to-English translation, zero pronouns in Japanese pose a challenge, since the model needs to infer and produce the corresponding pronoun in the target side of the English sentence. However, although fully resolving zero pronouns often needs discourse context, in some cases, the local context within a sentence gives clues to the inference of the zero pronoun. In this study, we propose a data augmentation method that provides additional training signals for the translation model to learn correlations between local context and zero pronouns. We show that the proposed method significantly improves the accuracy of zero pronoun translation with machine translation experiments in the conversational domain.

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Existing approaches to mapping-based crosslingual word embeddings are based on the assumption that the source and target embedding spaces are structurally similar. The structures of embedding spaces largely depend on the cooccurrence statistics of each word, which the choice of context window determines. Despite this obvious connection between the context window and mapping-based cross-lingual embeddings, their relationship has been underexplored in prior work. In this work, we provide a thorough evaluation, in various languages, domains, and tasks, of bilingual embeddings trained with different context windows. The highlight of our findings is that increasing the size of both the source and target window sizes improves the performance of bilingual lexicon induction, especially the performance on frequent nouns.

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Most machine translation (MT) research has focused on sentences as translation units (sentence-level MT), and has achieved acceptable translation quality for sentences where cross-sentential context is not required in mainly high-resourced languages. Recently, many researchers have worked on MT models that can consider a crosssentential context. These models are often called context-aware MT or documentlevel MT models. Document-level MT is difficult to 1) train with a small amount of document-level data; and 2) evaluate, as the main methods and datasets focus on sentence-level evaluation. To address the first issue, we present a Japanese-English conversation corpus in which the cross-sentential context is available. As for the second issue, we manually identify the main areas where sentence-level MT fails to produce adequate translations in the lack of context. We then create an evaluation set in which these phenomena are annotated to alleviate the automatic evaluation of document-level systems. We train MT models using our corpus to demonstrate how the use of context leads to improvements.

Unsupervised cross-lingual word embedding (CLWE) methods learn a linear transformation matrix that maps two monolingual embedding spaces that are separately trained with monolingual corpora. This method relies on the assumption that the two embedding spaces are structurally similar, which does not necessarily hold true in general. In this paper, we argue that using a pseudo-parallel corpus generated by an unsupervised machine translation model facilitates the structural similarity of the two embedding spaces and improves the quality of CLWEs in the unsupervised mapping method. We show that our approach outperforms other alternative approaches given the same amount of data, and, through detailed analysis, we show that data augmentation with the pseudo data from unsupervised machine translation is especially effective for mappingbased CLWEs because (1) the pseudo data makes the source and target corpora (partially) parallel; (2) the pseudo data contains information on the original language that helps to learn similar embedding spaces between the source and target languages.