NEWS 2009 Machine Transliteration Shared Task System Description: Transliteration with Letter-to-Phoneme Technology

Abstract

We interpret the problem of transliterating English named entities into Hindi or Japanese Katakana as a variant of the letter-to-phoneme (L2P) subtask of text-to-speech processing. Therefore, we apply a re-implementation of a state-of-the-art, discriminative L2P system (Jiampojamarn et al., 2008) to the problem, without further modification. In doing so, we hope to provide a baseline for the NEWS 2009 Machine Transliteration Shared Task (Li et al., 2009), indicating how much can be achieved without transliteration-specific technology. This paper briefly summarizes the original work and our reimplementation. We also describe a bug in our submitted implementation, and provide updated results on the development and test sets.