Web-Based Transliteration of Person Names

We have developed a web-based transliteration system of person names; from a person name written in English (Latin script), the system produces its Japanese (Katakana) transliteration extracted from the Web. Experiments have shown that the performance is sufficiently high: for 89.4% of English person names, the system produced one or more acceptable Japanese transliterations; 98.5% of system’s outputs were acceptable transliterations. This system was used for automatic compilation of an English-Japanese person-name lexicon with 406K entries.