Validating Transliteration Hypotheses Using the Web: Web Counts vs. Web Mining

We describe a novel approach for validating transliteration hypotheses based on a Web mining technique. We implemented a machine transliteration system and generated Chinese, Japanese, and Korean transliteration hypotheses for given English words. Then, we mined the Web for features relevant to validating transliteration hypotheses. Finally we validated transliteration hypotheses using machine learning algorithms learned with the mined features. Comparing Web counts with our Web mining technique, our proposed method consistently performed better than systems based on Web counts, regardless of the language.