Patent ID: 8326600

Claim:
A system, comprising: one or more computers configured to perform operations comprising: maintaining a plurality of transliteration rules and a respective weight for each transliteration rule, wherein each transliteration rule specifies a mapping of one or more characters in a first writing system to one or more characters in a different second writing system; receiving a plurality of training pairs, wherein each training pair comprises a first word in the first writing system and a second word in the second writing system, wherein the second word is a transliteration of the first word, and wherein each first word and each second word comprises one or more characters; processing the plurality of training pairs to determine, for each transliteration rule, one or more good weight adjustments and one or more bad weight adjustments, wherein each good weight adjustment and each bad weight adjustment is a numerical value, and wherein each good weight adjustment and each bad weight adjustment corresponds to a respective training pair in the plurality of training pairs, wherein the processing includes deriving the good weight adjustment or the bad weight adjustment for the training pair from an analysis of the respective weights for one or more of the one or more transliteration rules that, when applied to the characters of the first word of the respective training pair, result in the characters of the second word of the respective training pair, wherein each good weight adjustment is an adjustment that increases accuracy of a transliteration resulting from an application of the plurality of transliteration rules to a first word in a training pair, and wherein each bad weight adjustment is an adjustment that decreases accuracy of a transliteration resulting from an application of the plurality of transliteration rules to a first word in a training pair; and for each of one or more of the plurality of transliteration rules: selecting a first good weight adjustment for the transliteration rule that has a highest associated gain, wherein the associated gain for a particular good weight adjustment for the transliteration rule is derived from a count of the good weight adjustments for the transliteration rule that do not exceed the particular good weight adjustment and a count of the bad weight adjustments for the transliteration rule that do not exceed the particular good weight adjustment, and updating the weight for the transliteration rule to reflect the first good weight adjustment for the rule to generate a respective updated weight for the transliteration rule.