Learning to Find English to Chinese Transliterations on the Web

We present a method for learning to find English to Chinese transliterations on the Web. In our approach, proper nouns are expanded into new queries aimed at maximizing the probability of retrieving transliterations from existing search engines. The method involves learning the sublexical relationships between names and their transliterations. At run-time, a given name is automatically extended into queries with relevant morphemes, and transliterations in the returned search snippets are extracted and ranked. We present a new system, TermMine, that applies the method to find transliterations of a given name. Evaluation on a list of 500 proper names shows that the method achieves high precision and recall, and outperforms commercial machine translation systems.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: EMNLP
• Authors: Jian-Cheng Wu, Jason S. Chang
• Keywords: Chinese Transliterations, EMNLP 2007, Natural Language Processing, Proper Nouns, Transliterations