Report of NEWS 2010 Transliteration Mining Shared Task

This report documents the details of the Transliteration Mining Shared Task that was run as a part of the Named Entities Workshop (NEWS 2010), an ACL 2010 workshop. The shared task featured mining of name transliterations from the paired Wikipedia titles in 5 different language pairs, specifically, between English and one of Arabic, Chinese, Hindi Russian and Tamil. Totally 5 groups took part in this shared task, participating in multiple mining tasks in different languages pairs. The methodology and the data sets used in this shared task are published in the Shared Task White Paper [Kumaran et al, 2010]. We measure and report 3 metrics on the submitted results to calibrate the performance of individual systems on a commonly available Wikipedia dataset. We believe that the significant contribution of this shared task is in (i) assembling a diverse set of participants working in the area of transliteration mining, (ii) creating a baseline performance of transliteration mining systems in a set of diverse languages using commonly available Wikipedia data, and (iii) providing a basis for meaningful comparison and analysis of trade-offs between various algorithmic approaches used in mining. We believe that this shared task would complement the NEWS 2010 transliteration generation shared task, in enabling development of practical systems with a small amount of seed data in a given pair of languages.