An ensemble of grapheme and phoneme for machine transliteration

Abstract

Machine transliteration is an automatic method to generate characters or words in one alphabetical system for the corresponding characters in another alphabetical system. There has been increasing concern on machine transliteration as an assistant of machine translation and information retrieval. Three machine transliteration models, including "grapheme-based model", "phoneme-based model", and "hybrid model", have been proposed. However, there are few works trying to make use of correspondence between source grapheme and phoneme, although the correspondence plays an important role in machine transliteration. Furthermore there are few works, which dynamically handle source grapheme and phoneme. In this paper, we propose a new transliteration model based on an ensemble of grapheme and phoneme. Our model makes use of the correspondence and dynamically uses source grapheme and phoneme. Our method shows better performance than the previous works about 15 similar to 23% in English-to-Korean transliteration and about 15 similar to 43% in English-to-Japanese transliteration.