Transliteration of proper names in cross-lingual information retrieval

  • Authors:

  • Paola Virga;Sanjeev Khudanpur

  • Affiliations:

  • Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD;Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD

  • Venue:
  • MultiNER '03 Proceedings of the ACL 2003 workshop on Multilingual and mixed-language named entity recognition - Volume 15
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

We address the problem of transliterating English names using Chinese orthography in support of cross-lingual speech and text processing applications. We demonstrate the application of statistical machine translation techniques to "translate" the phonemic representation of an English name, obtained by using an automatic text-to-speech system, to a sequence of initials and finals, commonly used sub-word units of pronunciation for Chinese. We then use another statistical translation model to map the initial/final sequence to Chinese characters. We also present an evaluation of this module in retrieval of Mandarin spoken documents from the TDT corpus using English text queries.