Can Chinese Phonemes Improve Machine Transliteration?: A Comparative Study of English-to-Chinese Transliteration Models

Inspired by the success of English grapheme-to-phoneme research in speech synthesis, many researchers have proposed phoneme-based English-to-Chinese transliteration models. However, such approaches have severely suffered from the errors in Chinese phoneme-to-grapheme conversion. To address this issue, we propose a new English-to-Chinese transliteration model and make systematic comparisons with the conventional models. Our proposed model relies on the joint use of Chinese phonemes and their corresponding English graphemes and phonemes. Experiments showed that Chinese phonemes in our proposed model can contribute to the performance improvement in English-to-Chinese transliteration.