We address the problem of transliterating English names using Chinese orthography in support of cross-lingual speech and text processing applications. We demonstrate the application of statistical machine translation techniques to "translate" the phonemic representation of an English name, obtained by using an automatic text-to-speech system, to a sequence of initials and finals, commonly used subword units of pronunciation for Chinese. We then use another statistical translation model to map the initial/final sequence to Chinese characters. We also present an evaluation of this module in retrieval of Mandarin spoken documents from the TDT corpus using English text queries.
REF applied SMT models to translate English names into Chinese characters.
Transliteration Of Proper Names In Cross-Lingual Information Retrieval
Workshop On Multilingual And Mixed-Language Named Entity Recognition
Computer Science