An Optimized Approach to Translate Technical Patents from English to Japanese Using Machine Translation Models

Abstract

This paper addresses the challenges associated with machine translation of patents from English to Japanese. This translation poses unique difficulties due to their legal nature, distinguishing them from general Japanese-to-English translation. Furthermore, the complexities inherent in the Japanese language add an additional layer of intricacy to the development of effective translation models within this specific domain. Our approach encompasses a range of essential steps, including preprocessing, data preparation, expert feedback acquisition, and linguistic analysis. These steps collectively contribute to the enhancement of machine learning model performance. The experimental results, presented in this study, evaluate three prominent alternatives considered for the final step of the transformer model. Through our methodology, which incorporates a modified version of NLP-Model-III, we achieved outstanding performance for the given problem, attaining an impressive BLEU score of 46.8. Furthermore, significant improvements of up to three points on the BLEU score were observed through hyperparameter fine-tuning. This research also involved the development of a novel dataset consisting of meticulously collected patent document data. The findings of this study provide valuable insights and contribute to the advancement of Japanese patent translation methodologies.