Burmese (Myanmar) Name Romanization: A Sub-syllabic Segmentation Scheme for Statistical Solutions
Chenchen Ding, Win Pa Pa, Masao Utiyama, Eiichiro Sumita · Communications in computer and information science · 2018
We focus on Burmese name Romanization, a critical task in the translation of Burmese into languages using Latin script. As Burmese is under researched and not well resourced, we collected and manually annotated 2, 335 Romanization instances to enable statistical approaches. The annotation includes string segmentation and alignment between Burmese and Latin scripts. Although previous studies regard syllables as unbreakable units when processing Burmese, in this study, Burmese strings are segmented into well-designed sub-syllabic units to achieve precise and consistent alignment with Latin script. The experiments show that sub-syllabic units are better units than syllables for statistical approaches in Burmese name Romanization. The annotated data and segmentation program have been released under a CC BY-NC-SA license. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.