Transliteration Extraction from Classical Chinese Buddhist Literature Using Conditional Random Fields

Extracting plausible transliterations from historical literature is a key issues in historical linguistics and other resaech fields. In Chinese historical literature, the characters used to transliterate the same loanword may vary because of different translation eras or different Chinese language preferences among translators. To assist historical linguiatics and digial humanity researchers, this paper propose a transliteration extraction method based on the conditional random field method with the features based on the characteristics of the Chinese characters used in transliterations which are suitable to identify transliteration characters. To evaluate our method, we compiled an evaluation set from the two Buddhist texts, the Samyuktagama and the Lotus Sutra. We also construct a baseline approach with suffix array based extraction method and phonetic similarity measurement. Our method outperforms the baseline approach a lot and the recall of our method achieves 0.9561 and the precision is 0.9444. The results show our method is very effective to extract transliterations in classical Chinese texts.