Regularized Interlingual Projections: Evaluation on Multilingual Transliteration
Jagadeesh Jagarlamudi, Hal Daumé · 2012
In this paper, we address the problem of build-ing a multilingual transliteration system using an interlingual representation. Our approach uses international phonetic alphabet (IPA) to learn the interlingual representation and thus allows us to use any word and its IPA repre-sentation as a training example. Thus, our ap-proach requires only monolingual resources: a phoneme dictionary that lists words and their IPA representations.1 By adding a phoneme dictionary of a new language, we can readily build a transliteration system into any of the existing previous languages, without the ex-pense of all-pairs data or computation. We also propose a regularization framework for learning the interlingual representation, which accounts for language specific phonemic vari-ability, and thus it can find better mappings between languages. Experimental results on the name transliteration task in five diverse languages show a maximum improvement of 29 % and an average improvement of 17% compared to a state-of-the-art baseline system. 1