Abstract
This paper proposes a new hybrid method for machine transliteration. Our method is based on combining a newly proposed two-step conditional random field (CRF) method and the well-known joint source channel model (JSCM). The contributions of this paper are as follows: (1) A two-step CRF model for machine transliteration is proposed. The first CRF segments a character string of an input word into chunks and the second one converts each chunk into a character in the target language. (2) A joint optimization method of the two-step CRF model and a fast decoding algorithm are also proposed. Our experiments show that the joint optimization of the two-step CRF model works as well as or even better than the JSCM, and the fast decoding algorithm significantly decreases the decoding time. (3) A rapid development method based on a weighted finite state transducer (WFST) framework for the JSCM is proposed. (4) The combination of the proposed two-step CRF model and JSCM outperforms the state-of-the-art result in terms of top-1 accuracy.
