by Hirokazu Suzuki and Manuel Herranz The second TAUS Tokyo Forum was held on April 19th and 20th2012 at the Aoyama Centre, hosted by Oracle Japan. The Forum had to be cancelled last year as a result of the earthquake disaster which hit Japan on March 11th, 2011. Otherwise, the forum would have run its third edition this year. All of the participants from Japan rejoiced warm-heartedly to be able to take part in the forum again. [caption id="attachment_799" align="alignright" width="210"] TAUS Programme Committee[/caption] The main topic of TAUS Executive Forum was use cases of MT technologies and innovative business models. Dieu Tran (Cisco) and Alan Chung (SDL), who received a TAUS award for the best use case this time, talked about their integrated MT/TM system that makes effective use of SMT. Suguru Sakanishi (Yaraku, Inc.) and Miori Sagara (Baobab) presented their collaborative translation platforms that combine MT technology and human resources. Crowdsourcing translation with MT technologies drew attention in the forum. Manuel Herranz had presented PangeaMT machine translation use cases for European languages and laid the foundations for collaboration during his 2010 presentation. This year, Pangeanic was represented by BIJ's Mr Tokiharu Iwanaga, who co-presented with Mr Hirokazu Suzuki on the findings on hybridation between PangeaMT and Toshiba teams. The presentation explained a hybrid MT system in which RBMT technology from Toshiba contributeｄ to a pre-processing of a training corpus and SMT technology from Pangeanic made the best used of it. An article about the findings was published by the Asian Association of Machine Translation in 2011 and can be downloaded here. The difficulty in English<->Japanese translation is mainly caused by the large difference of word order. Thus, our Nipponization module made a fine impression on the participants and LSPs. A similar technology has also been being researched in NTT Communication Science Laboratories in Japan. After the forum, NTT announced that they would hold an open house on June 6th and 7th and present a word reordering technology: NTT Open House 2012 : http://www.kecl.ntt.co.jp/openhouse/2012/oh2012_poster_english.pdf Participants expressed their view that for such in order to make progress in machine translation when facing such differing languages like English (itself a crossbreed of Germanic and Romance languages) and Japanese (Altaic family) "word order is critical for translation quality --English<->Japanese translation by Japanized English--"
Both Toshiba's and Pangeanic's machine translation research teams remain committed to further collaboration and advancement.
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