Incorporating Pronunciation Variation into Different Strategies of Term Transliteration

Term transliteration addresses the problem of converting terms in one language into their phonetic equivalents in the other language via spoken form. It is especially concerned with proper nouns, such as personal names, place names and organization names. Pronunciation variation refers to pronunciation ambiguity frequently encountered in spoken language, which has a serious impact on term transliteration. More than one transliteration variants can be generated by an out-of-vocabulary term due to different kinds of pronunciation variations. It is important to take this issue into account when dealing with term transliteration. Several models, which take pronunciation variation into consideration, are proposed for term transliteration in this paper. They describe transliteration from various viewpoints and utilize the relationships trained from extracted transliterated-term pairs. An experiment in applying the proposed models to term transliteration was conducted and evaluated. The experimental results show promise. These proposed models are not only applicable to term transliteration, but also are helpful in indexing and retrieving spoken document retrieval.