Fuzzy translation of cross-lingual spelling variants

  • Authors:

  • Ari Pirkola;Jarmo Toivonen;Heikki Keskustalo;Kari Visala;Kalervo Järvelin

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Tampere, Finland;University of Tampere, Finland and Tampere University of Technology, Tampere, Finland;University of Tampere, Finland;University of Tampere, Finland;University of Tampere, Finland

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 26th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in informaion retrieval
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

We will present a novel two-step fuzzy translation technique for cross-lingual spelling variants. In the first stage, transformation rules are applied to source words to render them more similar to their target language equivalents. The rules are generated automatically using translation dictionaries as source data. In the second stage, the intermediate forms obtained in the first stage are translated into a target language using fuzzy matching. The effectiveness of the technique was evaluated empirically using five source languages and English as a target language. The target word list contained 189 000 English words with the correct equivalents for the source words among them. The source words were translated using the two-step fuzzy translation technique, and the results were compared with those of plain fuzzy matching based translation. The combined technique performed better, sometimes considerably better, than fuzzy matching alone.