Direct Orthographical Mapping for Machine Transliteration

Machine transliteration/back-transliteration plays an important role in many multilingual speech and language applications. In this paper, a novel framework for machine transliteration/backtransliteration that allows us to carry out direct orthographical mapping (DOM) between two different languages is presented. Under this framework, a joint source-channel transliteration model, also called n-gram transliteration model (ngram TM), is further proposed to model the transliteration process. We evaluate the proposed methods through several transliteration/backtransliteration experiments for English/Chinese and English/Japanese language pairs. Our study reveals that the proposed method not only reduces an extensive system development effort but also improves the transliteration accuracy significantly.