Quillpad Multilingual Predictive Transliteration System

Transliteration has been one of the common methods for multilingual text input. Many earlier methods employed transliteration schemes for defining one to one mapping of input character combinations to output character combinations. Though such well defined mappings made it easier to write a transliteration program, the end user was burdened with learning the mappings. Further, though transliteration schemes try to map the character combinations phonetically, it is unavoidable to introduce non intuitive combinations into the scheme. An alternative is to use predictive transliteration, where user can input a word, by intuitively combining the input alphabet phonetically and the predictive transliteration system correctly converts it to the target language. This paper presents the challenges that must be addressed to build such a system, and describes how Quillpad can be trained for performing predictive transliteration between any two scripts.