Sowmya V. Balakrishna¹ and Shankar M. Venkatesan², ¹University of Tuebingen, Germany and ²Philips Research India, India

Source and target word segmentation and alignment is a primary step in the statistical learning of a Transliteration. Here, we analyze the benefit of a syllable-like segmentation approach for learning a transliteration from English to an Indic language, which aligns the training set word pairs in terms of sub-syllable-like units instead of individual character units. While this has been found useful in the case of dealing with Out-of-vocabulary words in English-Chinese in the presence of multiple target dialects, we asked if this would be true for Indic languages which are simpler in their phonetic representation and pronunciation. We expected this syllable-like method to perform marginally better, but we found instead that even though our proposed approach improved the Top-1 accuracy, the individual-character-unit alignment model somewhat outperformed our approach when the Top-10 results of the system were re-ranked using language modeling approaches. Our experiments were conducted for English to Telugu transliteration (our method will apply equally well to most written Indic languages); our training consisted of a syllable-like segmentation and alignment of a large training set, on which we built a statistical model by modifying a previous character-level maximum entropy based Transliteration learning system due to Kumaran and Kellner; our testing consisted of using the same segmentation of a test English word, followed by applying the model, and re-ranking the resulting top 10 Telugu words. We also report the dataset creation and selection since standard datasets are not available.