Phoneme-based transliteration of foreign names for OOV problem

• Main Authors: GAO, Wei, WONG, Kam-Fai, LAM, Wai
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2004
• Subjects: Databases and Information Systems
• 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
• Institution: Singapore Management University

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.