Crawling English-Japanese Person-Name Transliterations from the Web

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Abstract

Automatic compilation of lexicon is a dream of lexicon compilers as well as lexicon users. This paper proposes a system that crawls English-Japanese person-name transliterations from the Web, which works a back-end collector for automatic compilation of bilingual person-name lexicon. Our crawler collected 561K transliterations in five months. From them, an English-Japanese person-name lexicon with 406K entries has been compiled by an automatic post processing. This lexicon is much larger than other similar resources including English-Japanese lexicon of HeiNER obtained from Wikipedia. names written in Latin script are transliterated into one in Katakana script according to their pronunciations. English-Japanese transliteration of person name is difficult because of several reasons, such as limited coverage of existing bilingual lexicons, non-English (e.g., French and German) person names appeared in English texts, and spelling variants in Katakana script. 2. There is a possibility that we can compile a large EnglishJapanese person-name lexicon from the Web, because a lot of transliteration instances of person names exist on the Web. Actually, human translators use the Web as a virtual low-quality bilingual lexicon. 3. New person names are produced; new person-name transliterations are produced in every day. Human translators hope frequent update of bilingual personname lexicon. This paper proposes a system that crawls English-Japanese person-name transliterations from the Web, which works as a back-end collector for automatic lexicon compilation. From collected transliterations, a bilingual person-name lexicon is produced by an automatic post processing. This attempt of automatic lexicon compilation can be viewed as a conversion from a virtual low-quality bilingual lexicon (i.e., the Web) to a real high-quality bilingual lexicon.