Collapsed Consonant and Vowel Models: New Approaches for English-Persian Transliteration and Back-Transliteration

We propose a novel algorithm for English to Persian transliteration. Previous methods proposed for this language pair apply a word alignment tool for training. By contrast, we introduce an alignment algorithm particularly designed for transliteration. Our new model improves the English to Persian transliteration accuracy by 14% over an n-gram baseline. We also propose a novel back-transliteration method for this language pair, a previously unstudied problem. Experimental results demonstrate that our algorithm leads to an absolute improvement of 25% over standard transliteration approaches.