In this paper, we present a multi-dialect neural MT (NMT) system tailored to Japanese.
we employ kana, a Japanese phonetic lettering system, as basic units in the encoder-decoder framework to avoid the following: ambiguity in converting kana to kanji (characters in the Japanese writing system); difficulties in identifying word boundaries especially for dialects; and data sparseness problems due to handling large numbers of words originating from different dialects.