Resource Creation for Training and Testing of Transliteration Systems for Indian Languages

Machine transliteration is used in a number of NLP applications ranging from machine translation and information retrieval to input mechanisms for non-roman scripts. Many popular Input Method Editors for Indian languages, like Baraha, Akshara, Quillpad etc, use back-transliteration as a mechanism to allow users to input text in a number of Indian language. The lack of a standard dataset to evaluate these systems makes it difficult to make any meaningful comparisons of their relative accuracies. In this paper, we describe the methodology for the creation of a dataset of ~2500 transliterated sentence pairs each in Bangla, Hindi and Telugu. The data was collected across three different modes from a total of 60 users. We believe that this dataset will prove useful not only for the evaluation and training of back-transliteration systems but also help in the linguistic analysis of the process of transliterating Indian languages from native scripts to Roman.