Multilingual Transliteration Using Feature based Phonetic Method

Abstract: In this paper we investigate named entity transliteration based on a phonetic scoring method. The phonetic method is computed using phonetic features and carefully designed pseudo features. The proposed method is tested with four languages – Arabic, Chinese, Hindi and Korean – and one source language – English, using comparable corpora. The proposed method is developed from the phonetic method originally proposed in Tao et al. (2006). In contrast to the phonetic method in Tao et al. (2006) constructed on the basis of pure linguistic knowledge, the method in this study is trained using the Winnow machine learning algorithm. There is salient improvement in Hindi and Arabic compared to the previous study. Moreover, we demonstrate that the method can also achieve comparable results, when it is trained on language data different from the target language. The method can be applied both with minimal data, and without target language data for various languages.