English-Hindi Transliteration using Multiple Similarity Metrics

In this paper, we present an approach to measure the transliteration similarity of English-Hindi word pairs. Our approach has two components. First we propose a bi-directional mapping between one or more characters in the Devanagari script and one or more characters in the Roman script (pronounced as in English). This allows a given Hindi word written in Devanagari to be transliterated into the Roman script and vice-versa. Second, we present an algorithm for computing a similarity measure that is a variant of Dice's coefficient measure and the LCSR measure and which also takes into account the constraints needed to match English-Hindi transliterated words. Finally, by evaluating various similarity metrics individually and together under a multiple measure agreement scenario, we show that it is possible to achieve a 0.92 f-measure in identifying English-Hindi word pairs that are transliterations. In order to assess the portability of our approach to other similar languages we adapt our system to the Gujarati language.