We tackle the problem of machine translation of manga, Japanese comics. Manga translation involves two important problems in machine translation: context-aware and multimodal translation… Since text and images are mixed up in an unstructured fashion in Manga, obtaining context from the image is essential for manga translation. However, it is still an open problem how to extract context from image and integrate into MT models. In addition, corpus and benchmarks to train and evaluate such model is currently unavailable. In […]

Recently, deep models have shown tremendous improvements in neural machine translation (NMT). However, systems of this kind are computationally expensive and memory intensive… In this paper, we take a natural step towards learning strong but light-weight NMT systems. We proposed a novel group-permutation based knowledge distillation approach to compressing the deep Transformer model into a shallow model. The experimental results on several benchmarks validate the effectiveness of our method. Our compressed model is 8X shallower than the deep model, with […]

Sentence-level (SL) machine translation (MT) has reached acceptable quality for many high-resourced languages, but not document-level (DL) MT, which is difficult to 1) train with little amount of DL data; and 2) evaluate, as the main methods and data sets focus on SL evaluation. To address the first issue, we present a document-aligned Japanese-English conversation corpus, including balanced, high-quality business conversation data for tuning and testing… As for the second issue, we manually identify the main areas where SL MT […]

The Iranian Persian language has two varieties: standard and colloquial. Most natural language processing tools for Persian assume that the text is in standard form: this assumption is wrong in many real applications especially web content… This paper describes a simple and effective standardization approach based on sequence-to-sequence translation. We design an algorithm for generating artificial parallel colloquial-to-standard data for learning a sequence-to-sequence model. Moreover, we annotate a publicly available evaluation data consisting of 1912 sentences from a diverse set […]

Multi-language machine translation without parallel corpora is challenging because there is no explicit supervision between languages. Existing unsupervised methods typically rely on topological properties of the language representations… We introduce a framework that instead uses the visual modality to align multiple languages, using images as the bridge between them. We estimate the cross-modal alignment between language and images, and use this estimate to guide the learning of cross-lingual representations. Our language representations are trained jointly in one model with a […]