Contributing to Improving the Accuracy of Machine Translation

Nagoya University Provides Approximately 530,000 Japanese-English Parallel-Translation Sentences from Nagoya University Documents to the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology’s "Hon’yaku (Translation) Bank"

In March 2022, National University Corporation Tokai National Higher Education and Research System, Nagoya University (President: MATSUO Seiichi) provided the data of approximately 530,000 Japanese-English sentence translation pairs from university rules, notifications, and correspondences, to the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (President: TOKUDA Hideyuki; hereinafter "NICT"), a National Research and Development Agency. The data will be used to help improve the accuracy of machine translation engines developed under the "Hon’yaku (Translation) Bank" scheme run by NICT and the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications.

In July 2009, Nagoya University was selected to be part of the "Project for Establishing Core Universities for Internationalization (Global 30)" (later renamed the "Project for Establishing University Network for Internationalization"), a MEXT project to support university educational reform. Since then, Nagoya University has engaged in a university-wide effort to translate university documents into foreign languages, particularly English, covering everything from education and research activities to university administration and management, in order to promote university globalization and provide an environment that supports students, faculty, and researchers who do not understand Japanese. Over the past 12 years, the collection of Japanese-English parallel translations produced as a result of these activities has reached approximately 4,100 documents, the majority of which are available online free of charge at the Nagoya University Translated Information Archiving Database (NUTRIAD).

Meanwhile in September 2017, to help enhance Japan’s international competitiveness amid the increasing globalization of social and economic activities, NICT and the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications introduced Hon’yaku (Translation) Bank, a project to collect translation data. Hon’yaku (Translation) Bank gathers data provided by many organizations in Japan, such as central government agencies, local governments, companies, and etc. and is being used to help improve the accuracy of machine translation technologies. The improved machine translation engines are being incorporated into a variety of hardware and services and are being used in work and everyday life.

The Japanese-English parallel translation data provided by Nagoya University, covering topics in university education and research, serve to enrich the fields supported by Hon’yaku (Translation) Bank and contribute to improving the accuracy of machine translation systems. Furthermore, the Japanese and English correspond to each other by sentence , which, as well as the volume of data, makes it a highly useful dataset.

By producing Japanese-English parallel translations for university documents and contributing that data, Nagoya University will continue to promote university globalization and use the fruits of these activities to give back to the community. NICT will continue its efforts to contribute to the globalization of universities and other institutions by working to further improve the accuracy of AI translation and promote its real-world application.

Nagoya University Translated Information Archiving Database (NUTRIAD)

http://nutriad.provost.nagoya-u.ac.jp/index_en.html

National Research and Development Agency, National Institute of Information and Communication Technology (NICT)

https://www.nict.go.jp/en/index.html

NICT is Japan’s only public research institute specializing in information and communications. NICT strives to promote the research and development of technology related to information and communications, from the fundamentals to practical applications; collaborate with universities, industry, local governments, and domestic and international research institutes; share research and development results with society at large; and foster innovation.

Hon’yaku (Translation) Bank