← Search

Masao Utiyama

23 accepted papers

2025

Comprehensive Evaluation on Lexical Normalization: Boundary-Aware Approaches for Unsegmented Languages

EMNLP 2025

Lexical normalization research has sought to tackle the challenge of processing informal expressions in user-generated text, yet the absence of comprehensive evaluations leaves it unclear which methods excel across multiple perspectives. Focusing on unsegmented languages, we make three key contribut

2025

PrahokBART: A Pre-trained Sequence-to-Sequence Model for Khmer Natural Language Generation

COLING 2025main

This work introduces PrahokBART, a compact pre-trained sequence-to-sequence model trained from scratch for Khmer using carefully curated Khmer and English corpora. We focus on improving the pre-training corpus quality and addressing the linguistic issues of Khmer, which are ignored in existing multi…

2025

Registering Source Tokens to Target Language Spaces in Multilingual Neural Machine Translation

ACL 2025long

The multilingual neural machine translation (MNMT) aims for arbitrary translations across multiple languages.Although MNMT-specific models trained on parallel data offer low costs in training and deployment, their performance consistently lags behind that of large language models (LLMs).In this work…

2025

TikZero: Zero-Shot Text-Guided Graphics Program Synthesis

ICCV 2025poster

Automatically synthesizing figures from text captions is a compelling capability. However, achieving high geometric precision and editability requires representing figures as graphics programs in languages like TikZ, and aligned training data (i.e., graphics programs with captions) remains scarce. M…

2024

Centroid-Based Efficient Minimum Bayes Risk Decoding

ACL 2024findings

Minimum Bayes risk (MBR) decoding achieved state-of-the-art translation performance by using COMET, a neural metric that has a high correlation with human evaluation.However, MBR decoding requires quadratic time since it computes the expected score between a translation hypothesis and all reference…

2023

Subset Retrieval Nearest Neighbor Machine Translation

ACL 2023long

k-nearest-neighbor machine translation (kNN-MT) (Khandelwal et al., 2021) boosts the translation performance of trained neural machine translation (NMT) models by incorporating example-search into the decoding algorithm. However, decoding is seriously time-consuming, i.e., roughly 100 to 1,000 times…

Cited by 18SourcePDFScholar
2022

Effective Graph Context Representation for Document-level Machine Translation

IJCAI 2022poster

Document-level neural machine translation (DocNMT) universally encodes several local sentences or the entire document. Thus, DocNMT does not consider the relevance of document-level contextual information, for example, some context (i.e., content words, logical order, and co-occurrence relation) is…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2022

Explicit Alignment Learning for Neural Machine Translation

IJCAI 2022poster

Even though neural machine translation (NMT) has become the state-of-the-art solution for end-to-end translation, it still suffers from a lack of translation interpretability, which may be conveniently enhanced by explicit alignment learning (EAL), as performed in traditional statistical machine tra…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2022

FeatureBART: Feature Based Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-Training for Low-Resource NMT

COLING 2022main

In this paper we present FeatureBART, a linguistically motivated sequence-to-sequence monolingual pre-training strategy in which syntactic features such as lemma, part-of-speech and dependency labels are incorporated into the span prediction based pre-training framework (BART). These automatically e…

Cited by 5SourcePDFScholar
2022

Synchronous Refinement for Neural Machine Translation

ACL 2022findings

Machine translation typically adopts an encoder-to-decoder framework, in which the decoder generates the target sentence word-by-word in an auto-regressive manner. However, the auto-regressive decoder faces a deep-rooted one-pass issue whereby each generated word is considered as one element of the…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2022

What Works and Doesn’t Work, A Deep Decoder for Neural Machine Translation

ACL 2022findings

Deep learning has demonstrated performance advantages in a wide range of natural language processing tasks, including neural machine translation (NMT). Transformer NMT models are typically strengthened by deeper encoder layers, but deepening their decoder layers usually results in failure. In this p…

2021

MiSS: An Assistant for Multi-Style Simultaneous Translation

EMNLP 2021system demonstrations

In this paper, we present MiSS, an assistant for multi-style simultaneous translation. Our proposed translation system has five key features: highly accurate translation, simultaneous translation, translation for multiple text styles, back-translation for translation quality evaluation, and grammati…

2021

Self-Training for Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation in Unbalanced Training Data Scenarios

NAACL 2021long

Unsupervised neural machine translation (UNMT) that relies solely on massive monolingual corpora has achieved remarkable results in several translation tasks. However, in real-world scenarios, massive monolingual corpora do not exist for some extremely low-resource languages such as Estonian, and UN…

Cited by 12SourcePDFScholar
2021

Smoothing Dialogue States for Open Conversational Machine Reading

EMNLP 2021main

Conversational machine reading (CMR) requires machines to communicate with humans through multi-turn interactions between two salient dialogue states of decision making and question generation processes. In open CMR settings, as the more realistic scenario, the retrieved background knowledge would b…

2021

Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation with Universal Grammar

EMNLP 2021main

Machine translation usually relies on parallel corpora to provide parallel signals for training. The advent of unsupervised machine translation has brought machine translation away from this reliance, though performance still lags behind traditional supervised machine translation. In unsupervised ma…

2021

User-Generated Text Corpus for Evaluating Japanese Morphological Analysis and Lexical Normalization

NAACL 2021long

Morphological analysis (MA) and lexical normalization (LN) are both important tasks for Japanese user-generated text (UGT). To evaluate and compare different MA/LN systems, we have constructed a publicly available Japanese UGT corpus. Our corpus comprises 929 sentences annotated with morphological a…

2020

Bilingual Subword Segmentation for Neural Machine Translation

COLING 2020main

This paper proposed a new subword segmentation method for neural machine translation, “Bilingual Subword Segmentation,” which tokenizes sentences to minimize the difference between the number of subword units in a sentence and that of its translation. While existing subword segmentation methods toke…

2020

Improving Low-Resource NMT through Relevance Based Linguistic Features Incorporation

COLING 2020main

In this study, linguistic knowledge at different levels are incorporated into the neural machine translation (NMT) framework to improve translation quality for language pairs with extremely limited data. Integrating manually designed or automatically extracted features into the NMT framework is know…

2020

Neural Machine Translation with Universal Visual Representation

ICLR 2020spotlight

Though visual information has been introduced for enhancing neural machine translation (NMT), its effectiveness strongly relies on the availability of large amounts of bilingual parallel sentence pairs with manual image annotations. In this paper, we present a universal visual representation learned…

Cited by 141SourcecodeScholar
2020

Robust Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation with Adversarial Denoising Training

COLING 2020main

Unsupervised neural machine translation (UNMT) has recently attracted great interest in the machine translation community. The main advantage of the UNMT lies in its easy collection of required large training text sentences while with only a slightly worse performance than supervised neural machine…