Improving English-Arabic Transliteration with Phonemic Memories

Yuanhe Tian, Renze Lou, Xiangyu Pang, Lianxi Wang, Shengyi Jiang, Yan Song


Abstract
Transliteration is an important task in natural language processing (NLP) which aims to convert a name in the source language to the target language without changing its pronunciation. Particularly, transliteration from English to Arabic is highly needed in many applications, especially in countries (e.g., United Arab Emirates (UAE)) whose most citizens are foreigners but the official language is Arabic. In such a task-oriented scenario, namely transliterating the English names to the corresponding Arabic ones, the performance of the transliteration model is highly important. However, most existing neural approaches mainly apply a universal transliteration model with advanced encoders and decoders to the task, where limited attention is paid to leveraging the phonemic association between English and Arabic to further improve model performance. In this paper, we focus on transliteration of people’s names from English to Arabic for the general public. In doing so, we collect a corpus named EANames by extracting high quality name pairs from online resources which better represent the names in the general public than linked Wikipedia entries that are always names of famous people). We propose a model for English-Arabic transliteration, where a memory module modeling the phonemic association between English and Arabic is used to guide the transliteration process. We run experiments on the collected data and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for English-Arabic transliteration.
Anthology ID:
2022.findings-emnlp.238
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Editors:
Yoav Goldberg, Zornitsa Kozareva, Yue Zhang
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3262–3272
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-emnlp.238
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.findings-emnlp.238
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yuanhe Tian, Renze Lou, Xiangyu Pang, Lianxi Wang, Shengyi Jiang, and Yan Song. 2022. Improving English-Arabic Transliteration with Phonemic Memories. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022, pages 3262–3272, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Improving English-Arabic Transliteration with Phonemic Memories (Tian et al., Findings 2022)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-emnlp.238.pdf