English to Urdu transliteration: An application of Soundex algorithm

Transliteration algorithms are used to convert Romanized form of Urdu in Urdu script. But the accuracy of such systems is greatly reduced by presence of English words like weak, next etc. in online conversations. In this paper we present dictionary based solution to convert English word to Urdu script. In doing so accent conversion problem may arise that is handled through Soundex based algorithm where relative positions of transcriptions and Urdu language rules are combined to assign codes to English words which are then mapped to Urdu script. We have integrated our work with an existing roman Urdu transliteration system and experimental results have proved the significance of our work both for standalone English transliteration and as a part of roman Urdu transliteration framework.