Dudley North visits North London: Learning When to Transliterate to Arabic

Mahmoud Azab, Houda Bouamor, Behrang Mohit and Kemal Oflazer

We report the results of our work on automating the transliteration decision of named entities for English to Arabic machine translation. We construct a classification-based framework to automate this decision, evaluate our classifier both in the limited news and the diverse Wikipedia domains, and achieve promising accuracy. Moreover, we demonstrate a reduction of translation error and an improvement in the performance of an English-to-Arabic machine translation system.