Bootstrapping of a Multilingual Transliteration Dictionary for European Languages

Marcis Pinnis

Abstract: Transliteration dictionaries are an important resource for the development of machine transliteration systems. The paper describes and analyses a large multilingual transliteration dictionary extracted from probabilistic dictionaries for 24 European languages containing approximately 1.25 million transliterated word pairs. The transliteration dictionary is evaluated: 1) manually for the Latvian-English language pair and 2) automatically within a statistical machine translation based transliteration task for all 23 language pairs.