Phoneme-based transliteration of foreign names for OOV problem

A proper noun dictionary is never complete rendering name translation from English to Chinese ineffective. One way to solve this problem is not to rely on a dictionary alone but to adopt automatic translation according to pronunciation similarities, i.e. to map phonemes comprising an English name to...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: GAO, Wei, WONG, Kam-Fai, LAM, Wai
Format: text
Language:English
Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2004
Subjects:
Online Access:https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/4605
https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/5608/viewcontent/Gao2005_Chapter_Phoneme_BasedTransliterationOf.pdf
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Institution: Singapore Management University
Language: English
Description
Summary:A proper noun dictionary is never complete rendering name translation from English to Chinese ineffective. One way to solve this problem is not to rely on a dictionary alone but to adopt automatic translation according to pronunciation similarities, i.e. to map phonemes comprising an English name to the phonetic representations of the corresponding Chinese name. This process is called transliteration. We present a statistical transliteration method. An efficient algorithm for aligning phoneme chunks is described. Unlike rule-based approaches, our method is data-driven. Compared to source-channel based statistical approaches, we adopt a direct transliteration model, i.e. the direction of probabilistic estimation conforms to the transliteration direction. We demonstrate comparable performance to source-channel based system.