Punjabi Machine Transliteration

Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Computational Linguistics and 44th Annual Meeting of the ACL, pages 1137–1144, Sydney, July 2006. c⃝2006 Association for Computational Linguistics Punjabi Machine Transliteration M. G. Abbas Malik Department of Linguistics Denis Diderot, University of Paris 7 Paris, France abbas.malik@gmail.com Abstract Machine Transliteration is to transcribe a word written in a script with approximate phonetic equivalence in another lan- guage. It is useful for machine transla- tion, cross-lingual information retrieval, multilingual text and speech processing. Punjabi Machine Transliteration (PMT) is a special case of machine translitera- tion and is a process of converting a word from Shahmukhi (based on Arabic script) to Gurmukhi (derivation of Landa, Shardha and Takri, old scripts of Indian subcontinent), two scripts of Punjabi, ir- respective of the type of word. The Punjabi Machine Transliteration System uses transliteration rules (charac- ter mappings and dependency rules) for transliteration of Shahmukhi words into Gurmukhi. The PMT system can translit- erate every word written in Shahmukhi. 1 Introduction Punjabi is the mother tongue of more than 110 million people of Pakistan (66 million), India (44 million) and many millions in America, Canada and Europe. It has been written in two mutually incomprehensible scripts Shahmukhi and Gur- mukhi for centuries. Punjabis from Pakistan are unable to comprehend Punjabi written in Gur- mukhi and Punjabis from India are unable to comprehend Punjabi written in Shahmukhi. In contrast, they do not have any problem to under- stand the verbal expression of each other. Pun- jabi Machine Transliteration (PMT) system is an effort to bridge the written communication gap between the two scripts for the benefit of the mil- lions of Punjabis around the globe. Transliteration refers to phonetic translation across two languages with different writing sys- tems (Knight & Graehl, 1998), such as Arabic to English (Nasreen & Leah, 2003). Most prior work has been done for Machine Translation (MT) (Knight & Leah, 97; Paola & Sanjeev, 2003; Knight & Stall, 1998) from English to other major languages of the world like Arabic, Chinese, etc. for cross-lingual information re- trieval (Pirkola et al, 2003), for the development of multilingual resources (Yan et al, 2003; Kang & Kim, 2000) and for the development of cross- lingual applications. PMT is a special kind of machine translitera- tion. It converts a Shahmukhi word into a Gur- mukhi word irrespective of the type constraints of the word. It not only preserves the phonetics of the transliterated word but in contrast to usual transliteration, also preserves the meaning. Two scripts are discussed and compared. Based on this comparison and analysis, character mappings between Shahmukhi and Gurmukhi are drawn and transliteration rules are discussed. Finally, architecture and process of the PMT sys- tem are discussed. When it is applied to Punjabi Unicode encoded text especially designed for testing, the results were complied and analyzed. PMT system will provide basis for Cross- Scriptural Information Retrieval (CSIR) and Cross-Scriptural Application Development (CSAD). 2 Punjabi Machine Transliteration According to Paola (2003), “When writing a for- eign …

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