Transliteration Equivalence Using Canonical Correlation Analysis

摘要

We address the problem of Transliteration Equivalence, I.e. determining whether a pair of words in two different languages (e.g. Auden, (SfTs-T)) are name transliterations or not. This problem is at the heart of Mining Name Transliterations (MINT) from various sources of multilingual text data including parallel, comparable, and non-comparable corpora and multilingual news streams. MINT is useful in several cross-language tasks including Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR), Machine Translation (MT), and Cross-Language Named Entity Retrieval. We propose a novel approach to Transliteration Equivalence using language-neutral representations of names. The key idea is to consider name transliterations in two languages as two views of the same semantic object and compute a low-dimensional common feature space using Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA). Similarity of the names in the common feature space forms the basis for classifying a pair of names as transliterations. We show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in the CLIR task for Hindi-English (3 collections) and Tamil-English (2 collections).