Using Transliteration of Proper Names from Arabic to Latin Script to Improve English-Arabic Word Alignment

Bilingual lexicons of proper names play a vital role in machine translation and cross-language information retrieval. Word alignment approaches are generally used to construct bilingual lexicons automatically from parallel corpora. Aligning proper names is a task particularly difficult when the source and target languages of the parallel corpus do not share a same written script. We present in this paper a system to transliterate automatically proper names from Arabic to Latin script, and a tool to align single and compound words from English-Arabic parallel texts. We particularly focus on the impact of using transliteration to improve the performance of the word alignment tool. We have evaluated the word alignment tool integrating transliteration of proper names from Arabic to Latin script using two methods: A manual evaluation of the alignment quality and an evaluation of the impact of this alignment on the translation quality by using the open source statistical machine translation system Moses. Experiments show that integrating transliteration of proper names into the alignment process improves the Fmeasure of word alignment from 72% to 81% and the translation BLEU score from 20.15% to 20.63%.