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Show HN: Neural Japanese Transliteration

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Re: Show HN: Neural Japanese Transliteration

#51

Post by Iv »

ue_ wrote: post #49
Iv wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True on the smartphone. On the computer most Japanese speakers I know just type romaji. However, this is pretty much irrelevant to this article, as romaji->kanas (the phonetic alphabets) is a pretty straightforward and solved problem (there is a clear bijection between both). The real problem is transforming the phonetic transliteration into the correct word in either kanji (for most Japanese words) or katakana (for…

Do people really use romaji on keyboards in Japan? This strikes me as an odd way to type, as it means that you first need to learn romaji in order to type. I thought that hiragana keyboards (hiragana mapped onto the normal layout) were the norm, especially on laptop keyboards.

A typical keyboard will look like this: https://qph.ec.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-2394848830a7526592f3a1...

But none of the Japanese I know use the hiragana directly. They told me it is mostly old people who use it. Almost every Japanese knows romajis now, there is no additional cost of learning a new alphabet.

Re: Show HN: Neural Japanese Transliteration

#52

Post by hasenj »

ekianjo wrote: post #41
hasenj wrote: post #39

I'm more interested in (kind of) the reverse. Given a Japanese sentence (that uses kanji), figure out the proper reading for each Kanji character, using a neutral network. I know there are already hardcoded analyzers, like kuromoji, but they produce incorrect answers in a lot of edge cases.

its very hard to do that since there are cases when you can read the kanji In multiple ways, like In peoples names for examples. Japanese is full of exceptions because the writing system was imported very, very late In Japan (300ad) without much effort to standardize its application.

Well, it only needs to be as good as a knowledge human expert. When there's no right answer, then there's no right answer. And that's ok.

Re: Show HN: Neural Japanese Transliteration

#53

Post by wodenokoto »

kyubyong wrote: post #50
wodenokoto wrote: post #46

I feel like I've read that readme file a few 2-3 years ago, but everything says 14 hours ago. Anybody familiar with the history of this project?

I created this repo early this year.

Then it must be my memory playing a trick on me. Thank you for elaborating.

Re: Show HN: Neural Japanese Transliteration

#54

Post by derefr »

gizmo686 wrote: post #14
derefr wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spoken Japanese isn't any more ambiguous than English (for a human, or a speech-to-text AI) because Japanese people pause between spoken words just like anyone else. But a stream of romaji furigana with no spaces is quite ambiguous—since there's nothing to indicate word boundaries, any substring of the input might turn out to have actually intended to be e.g. a katakana spelling of a name. If CJK IMEs expected and re…

>because Japanese people pause between spoken words just like anyone else. This is (surprisingly) not true. People do not pause between words, however when listening to a language that they understand, they do perceive pauses between words; even though such pauses do not exist.

Wow, there are a lot of responses putting a lot of weight in my exact choice of words, here.

I'm not a linguist; I don't know what the proper name is for the thing people do between each pair of spoken words—that they don't do inside words—but I do know that there is something people do there. I would call it "a pause" because that is the function it serves. It's an overlap of lesser "terminal" sounds that forms something that is detectably a semantic gap—like the pause between crossfaded tracks on a gapless record, or between movements in a concerto.

Whatever it is, it is there, because speech-recognition systems use it to detect spoken word boundaries regardless of language. (This heuristic does screw up sometimes; spoken language does often "slur" particular word-pairs together. But it's rare enough that these can be trained as specific exceptions to the rule, rather than needing to throw out the rule.)

Re: Show HN: Neural Japanese Transliteration

#55

Post by yomly »

snakeboy wrote: post #25
yomly wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. There's a subtle difference between breathing cadence and inflection, and a completely monotempo monotonal string of sounds.

It seems like it'd be useful for one or both of you to cite any research than has been done on this. Seems more productive (and enlightening to all) than the agree/disagree dialogue here.

Well for starters, a Japanese speaker can tell the differences between God "kami" and paper "kami"...

A monotonal, monotempo sound would not be able to make that difference audible

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_pitch_accent

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