About cookies on this site Our websites require some cookies to function properly (required). In addition, other cookies may be used with your consent to analyze site usage, improve the user experience and for advertising. For more information, please review your options. By visiting our website, you agree to our processing of information as described in IBM’sprivacy statement. To provide a smooth navigation, your cookie preferences will be shared across the IBM web domains listed here.
Publication
EMNLP 2008
Conference paper
When Harry Met Harri: Cross-lingual name spelling normalization
Abstract
Foreign name translations typically include multiple spelling variants. These variants cause data sparseness problems, increase Out-of-Vocabulary (OOV) rate, and present challenges for machine translation, information extraction and other NLP tasks. This paper aims to identify name spelling variants in the target language using the source name as an anchor. Based on word-to-word translation and transliteration probabilities, as well as the string edit distance metric, target name translations with similar spellings are clustered. With this approach tens of thousands of high precision name translation spelling variants are extracted from sentence-aligned bilingual corpora. When these name spelling variants are applied to Machine Translation and Information Extraction tasks, improvements over strong baseline systems are observed in both cases. © 2008 Association for Computational Linguistics.