Field Experiments of Real Time Foreign News Distribution Powered by MT

Field experiments on a foreign news distribution system using two key technologies are reported. The first technology is a summarization component, which is used for generating news headlines. This component is a transformer-based abstractive text summarization system which is trained to output headlines from the leading sentences of news articles. The second technology is machine translation (MT), which enables users to read foreign news articles in their mother language. Since the system uses MT, users can immediately access the latest foreign news. 139 Japanese LINE users participated in the field experiments for two weeks, viewing about 40,000 articles which had been translated from English to Japanese. We carried out surveys both during and after the experiments. According to the results, 79.3% of users evaluated the headlines as adequate, while 74.7% of users evaluated the automatically translated articles as intelligible. According to the post-experiment survey, 59.7% of users wished to continue using the system; 11.5% of users did not. We also report several statistics of the experiments.