GeoName: A System For Back-Transliterating Pinyin Place Names

To be unambiguous about a Chinese geographic name represented in English text as Pinyin, one needs to recover the name in Chinese characters. We present our approach to this back-transliteration problem based on processes such as bilingual geographic name lookup, name suggestion using place name character and pair frequencies, and confirmation via a collection of monolingual names or the WWW. Evaluation shows that about 48% to 72% of the correct names can be recovered as the top candidate, and 82% to 86% within top ten, depending on the processes employed.