Automatic Transliteration and Back-transliteration by Decision Tree Learning

Automatic transliteration and back-transliteration across languages with drastically different alphabets and phonemes inventories such as English/Korean, English/Japanese, English/Arabic, English/Chinese, etc, have practical importance in machine translation, crosslingual information retrieval, and automatic bilingual dictionary compilation, etc. In this paper, a bi-directional and to some extent language independent methodology for English/Korean transliteration and back-transliteration is described. Our method is composed of character alignment and decision tree learning. We induce transliteration rules for each English alphabet and back-transliteration rules for each Korean alphabet. For the training of decision trees we need a large labeled examples of transliteration and backtransliteration. However this kind of resources are generally not available. Our character alignment algorithm is capable of highly accurately aligning English word and Korean transliteration in a desired way.