Report of NEWS 2016 Machine Transliteration Shared Task

Abstract

This report documents the Machine Transliteration Shared Task conducted as a part of the Named Entities Workshop (NEWS 2011), an IJCNLP 2011 workshop. The shared task features machine transliteration of proper names from English to 11 languages and from 3 languages to English. In total, 14 tasks are provided. 10 teams from 7 different countries participated in the evaluations. Finally, 73 standard and 4 non-standard runs are submitted, where diverse transliteration methodologies are explored and reported on the evaluation data. We report the results with 4 performance metrics. We believe that the shared task has successfully achieved its objective by providing a common benchmarking platform for the research community to evaluate the state-of-the-art technologies that benefit the future research and development.