Transliteration of proper names in cross-language applications

13 years 10 months ago

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Translation of proper names is generally recognized as a signiﬁcant problem in many multi-lingual text and speech processing applications. Even when large bilingual lexicons used for machine translation (MT) and cross-lingual information retrieval (CLIR) provide signiﬁcant coverage of the words encountered in the text, a signiﬁcant portion of the tokens not covered by such lexicons are proper names (cf e.g. [3]). For CLIR applications in particular, proper names and technical terms are particularly important, as they carry some of the more distinctive information in a query. In IR systems where users provide very short queries (e.g. 2-3 words), their importance grows even further. Proper names are amenable to a speech-inspired translation approach. When writing a foreign name in ones native language, one tries to preserve the way it sounds. i.e. one uses an orthographic representation which, when “read aloud” by a native speaker of the language sounds as it would when spoken...

Paola Virga, Sanjeev Khudanpur

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