Automatic transliteration for Japanese-to-English text retrieval

  • Authors:

  • Yan Qu;Gregory Grefenstette;David A. Evans

  • Affiliations:

  • Clairvoyance Corporation, Pittsburgh, PA;Clairvoyance Corporation, Pittsburgh, PA;Clairvoyance Corporation, Pittsburgh, PA

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

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Abstract

For cross language information retrieval (CLIR) based on bilingual translation dictionaries, good performance depends upon lexical coverage in the dictionary. This is especially true for languages possessing few inter-language cognates, such as between Japanese and English. In this paper, we describe a method for automatically creating and validating candidate Japanese transliterated terms of English words. A phonetic English dictionary and a set of probabilistic mapping rules are used for automatically generating transliteration candidates. A monolingual Japanese corpus is then used for automatically validating the transliterated terms. We evaluate the usage of the extracted English-Japanese transliteration pairs with Japanese to English retrieval experiments over the CLEF bilingual test collections. The use of our automatically derived extension to a bilingual translation dictionary improves average precision, both before and after pseudo-relevance feedback, with gains ranging from 2.5% to 64.8%.