English-Chinese Name Transliteration with Bi-Directional Syllable-Based Maximum Matching

In this paper, we propose a simple and intuitive yet linguistically and practically motivated method for English-Chinese name transliteration generation. Our system is essentially a syllable-based Maximum Matching system. It uses the Onset First Principle to syllabify English names and align them with Chinese names. The bilingual lexicon containing aligned segments of various syllable lengths subsequently allows direct transliteration by chunks. The proposed method was tested on the data from the shared task of the Named Entities Workshop 2009. The results suggest that Forward Maximum Matching performed slightly better than Backward Maximum Matching, but when used together much better results comparable to those of state-of-the-art methods could be attained.