A python toolkit for universal transliteration

Ting Qian, Kristy Hollingshead, Su Youn Yoon, Kyoung Young Kim, Richard Sproat

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

18 Scopus citations

Abstract

We describe ScriptTranscriber, an open source toolkit for extracting transliterations in comparable corpora from languages written in different scripts. The system includes various methods for extracting potential terms of interest from raw text, for providing guesses on the pronunciations of terms, and for comparing two strings as possible transliterations using both phonetic and temporal measures. The system works with any script in the Unicode Basic Multilingual Plane and is easily extended to include new modules. Given comparable corpora, such as newswire text, in a pair of languages that use different scripts, ScriptTranscriber provides an easy way to mine transliterations from the comparable texts. This is particularly useful for underresourced languages, where training data for transliteration may be lacking, and where it is thus hard to train good transliterators. ScriptTranscriber provides an open source package that allows for ready incorporation of more sophisticated modules - e.g. a trained transliteration model for a particular language pair. ScriptTranscriber is available as part of the nltk contrib source tree at http://code.google.com/p/nltk/.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 7th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2010
EditorsDaniel Tapias, Irene Russo, Olivier Hamon, Stelios Piperidis, Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Joseph Mariani, Helene Mazo, Bente Maegaard, Jan Odijk, Mike Rosner
PublisherEuropean Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Pages2897-2901
Number of pages5
ISBN (Electronic)2951740867, 9782951740860
StatePublished - 2010
Externally publishedYes
Event7th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2010 - Valletta, Malta
Duration: May 17 2010May 23 2010

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 7th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2010

Conference

Conference7th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2010
Country/TerritoryMalta
CityValletta
Period5/17/105/23/10

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Education
  • Library and Information Sciences
  • Linguistics and Language
  • Language and Linguistics

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