Report of NEWS 2009 machine transliteration shared task

This report documents the details of the Machine Transliteration Shared Task conducted as a part of the Named Entities Workshop (NEWS), an ACL-IJCNLP 2009 workshop. The shared task features machine transliteration of proper names from English to a set of languages. This shared task has witnessed enthusiastic participation of 31 teams from all over the world, with diversity of participation for a given system and wide coverage for a given language pair (more than a dozen participants per language pair). Diverse transliteration methodologies are represented adequately in the shared task for a given language pair, thus underscoring the fact that the workshop may truly indicate the state of the art in machine transliteration in these language pairs. We measure and report 6 performance metrics on the submitted results. We believe that the shared task has successfully achieved the following objectives: (i) bringing together the community of researchers in the area of Machine Transliteration to focus on various research avenues, (ii) Calibrating systems on common corpora, using common metrics, thus creating a reasonable baseline for the state-of-the-art of transliteration systems, and (iii) providing a quantitative basis for meaningful comparison and analysis between various algorithmic approaches used in machine transliteration. We believe that the results of this shared task would uncover a host of interesting research problems, giving impetus to research in this significant research area.