A Machine Translation Approach for Chinese Whole-Sentence Pinyin-to-Character Conversion
Shaohua Yang, Hai Zhao, Bao‐Liang Lu · Waseda University Repository (Waseda University) · 2012
This paper introduces a new approach to solve the Chinese Pinyin-to-character (PTC) conversion problem.The conversion from Chinese Pinyin to Chinese character can be regarded as a transformation between two different languages (from the Latin writing system of Chinese Pinyin to the character form of Chinese,Hanzi), which can be naturally solved by machine translation framework.PTC problem is usually regarded as a sequence labeling problem, however, it is more difficult than any other general sequence labeling problems, since it requires a large label set of all Chinese characters for the labeling task.The essential difficulty of the task lies in the high degree of ambiguities of Chinese characters corresponding to Pinyins.Our approach is novel in that it effectively combines the features of continuous source sequence and target sequence.The experimental results show that the proposed approach is much faster, besides, we got a better result and outperformed the existing sequence labeling approaches.