A joint source-channel model for machine transliteration

Most foreign names are transliterated into Chinese, Japanese or Korean with approximate phonetic equivalents. The transliteration is usually achieved through intermediate phonemic mapping. This paper presents a new framework that allows direct orthographical mapping (DOM) between two different languages, through a joint source-channel model, also called n-gram transliteration model (TM). With the n-gram TM model, we automate the orthographic alignment process to derive the aligned transliteration units from a bilingual dictionary. The n-gram TM under the DOM framework greatly reduces system development effort and provides a quantum leap in improvement in transliteration accuracy over that of other state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms. The modeling framework is validated through several experiments for English-Chinese language pair.