Improving Transliteration with Precise Alignment of Phoneme Chunks and Using Contextual Features

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Information Retrieval Technology (AIRS 2004)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 3411))

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Abstract

Automatic transliteration of foreign names is basically regarded as a diminutive clone of the machine translation (MT) problem. It thus follows IBM’s conventional MT models under the source-channel framework. Nonetheless, some parameters of this model dealing with zero-fertility words in the target sequences, can negatively impact transliteration effectiveness because of the inevitable inverted conditional probability estimation. Instead of source-channel, this paper presents a direct probabilistic transliteration model using contextual features of phonemes with a tailored alignment scheme for phoneme chunks. Experiments demonstrate superior performance over the source-channel for the task of English-Chinese transliteration.

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Gao, W., Wong, KF., Lam, W. (2005). Improving Transliteration with Precise Alignment of Phoneme Chunks and Using Contextual Features. In: Myaeng, S.H., Zhou, M., Wong, KF., Zhang, HJ. (eds) Information Retrieval Technology. AIRS 2004. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3411. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-31871-2_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-31871-2_10

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-25065-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-31871-2

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