English to Persian transliteration

Abstract

Persian is an Indo-European language written using Arabic script, and is an official language of Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan. Transliteration of Persian to English - that is, the character-by-character mapping of a Persian word that is not readily available in a bilingual dictionary - is an unstudied problem. In this paper we make three novel contributions. First, we present performance comparisons of existing grapheme-based transliteration methods on English to Persian. Second, we discuss the difficulties in establishing a corpus for studying transliteration. Finally, we introduce a new model of Persian that takes into account the habit of shortening, or even omitting, runs of English..