A Punjabi to Hindi Machine Transliteration System

Transliteration is the general choice for handling named entities and out of vocabulary words in any MT application, particularly in machine translation. Transliteration (or forward transliteration) is the process of mapping source language phonemes or graphemes into target language approximations; the reverse process is called back transliteration. This paper presents a novel approach to improve Punjabi to Hindi transliteration by combining a basic character to character mapping approach with rule based and Soundex based enhancements. Experimental results show that our approach effectively improves the word accuracy rate and average Levenshtein distance of the various categories by a large margin.