Improving Translation of Unknown Proper Names Using a Hybrid Web-based Translation Extraction Method

Recently, we have proposed several effective Web-based term translation extraction methods exploring Web resources to deal with translation of Web query terms. However, many unknown proper names in Web queries are still difficult to be translated by using our previous Web-based term translation extraction methods. Therefore, in this paper we propose a new hybrid translation extraction method, which combines our pervious Web-based term translation extraction method and a new Web-based transliteration method in order to improve translation of unknown proper names. In addition, to efficiently construct a good quality transliteration model, we also present a mixed-syllable-mapping transliteration model and a Web-based semi-supervised learning algorithm to explore search-result pages further for collecting large amounts of English-Chinese transliteration pairs from the Web.