Extraction of name and transliteration in monolingual and parallel corpora

Abstract

Named-entities in free text represent a challenge to text analysis in Machine Translation and Cross Language Information Retrieval. These phrases are often transliterated into another language with a different sound inventory and writing system. Named-entities found in free text are often not listed in bilingual dictionaries. Although it is possible to identify and translate named-entities on the fly without a list of proper names and transliterations, an extensive list of existing transliterations certainly will ensure high precision rate. We use a seed list of proper names and transliterations to train a Machine Transliteration Model. With the model it is possible to extract proper names and their transliterations in monolingual or parallel corpora with high precision and recall rates. © Springer-Verlag 2004.