CHINESE NAME TRANSLITERATION

• US 20140244234A1
• Filed: 02/26/2013
• Published: 08/28/2014
• Est. Priority Date: 02/26/2013
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Original Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Inventors: Huang, Shudong, King, Nien C.
• Granted Patent: US 9,858,268 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 704/2
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/129 Handling non-Latin characters, e.g. kana-to-kanji conversion
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/205 Parsing
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/279 Recognition of textual entities
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/44 Statistical methods, e.g. probability models
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/58 Use of machine translation, e.g. for multi-lingual retrieval, for server-side translation for client devices or for real-time translation

Abstract

Chinese name transliteration is described. A Chinese name including a surname followed by a given name is received. The received Chinese name is parsed into a surname and a given name by: identifying any dual-character surnames in the received Chinese name, by referencing a list of known Chinese surnames; identifying any single-character surnames in the received Chinese name, by referencing the list of known Chinese surnames; and identifying, among the remaining characters in the received Chinese name, any characters not belonging to a dual-character or a single-character surname as a given name. The identified surname and the identified given name are transliterated into a Mandarin Pinyin representation. The Mandarin Pinyin representation of the surname and the given name is normalized into a pre-determined representation.

Claims

1. A computer-implemented method for Chinese name transliteration, comprising:

receiving, by a processor, a Chinese name including a surname followed by a given name;

parsing, by the processor, the received Chinese name into a surname and a given name by;

identifying any dual-character surnames in the received Chinese name, by referencing a list of known Chinese surnames,

identifying any single-character surnames in the received Chinese name, by referencing the list of known Chinese surnames, and

identifying, among the remaining characters in the received Chinese name, any characters not belonging to a dual-character or a single-character surname as a given name,

transliterating, by the processor, the identified surname and the identified given name into a Mandarin Pinyin representation; and

normalizing, by the processor, the Mandarin Pinyin representation of the surname and the given name into a pre-determined representation.

2. The method of claim 1, wherein the transliterating of the surname and given name is performed using an International Components for Unicode Han-Latin module.

3. The method of claim 1, wherein the name parsing uses a collection of common surnames to identify possible surname and given name patterns in the received Chinese name.

4. The method of claim 1, wherein the name parsing is applied only to Chinese names that are six characters or shorter in length.

5. The method of claim 1, wherein transliterating further comprises:

determining whether a character in a surname or a given name is context sensitive; and

in response to determining that the character is context sensitive, applying an exception rule to the character.

6. The method of claim 1, wherein normalizing includes removing any diacritic symbols added during the parsing and transliteration steps.

7. The method of claim 1, wherein identifying dual-character and single-character surnames is done in a left-to-right order.

8. The method of claim 1, wherein the pre-determined representation is determined by an external application from which the Chinese name is received.

9. A computer program product for Chinese name translation, the computer program product comprising a computer readable storage medium having program code embodied therewith, the program code being executable by a processor to perform a method comprising:

receiving, by a processor, a Chinese name including a surname followed by a given name;

parsing, by the processor, the received Chinese name into a surname and a given name by;

identifying any dual-character surnames in the received Chinese name, by referencing a list of known Chinese surnames,

identifying any single-character surnames in the received Chinese name, by referencing the list of known Chinese surnames, and

identifying, among the remaining characters in the received Chinese name, any characters not belonging to a dual-character or a single-character surname as a given name,

transliterating, by the processor, the identified surname and the identified given name into a Mandarin Pinyin representation; and

normalizing, by the processor, the Mandarin Pinyin representation of the surname and the given name into a pre-determined representation.

10. The computer program product of claim 9, wherein the transliterating of the surname and given name is performed using an International Components for Unicode Han-Latin module.

11. The computer program product of claim 9, wherein the name parsing uses a collection of common surnames to identify possible surname and given name patterns in the received Chinese name.

12. The computer program product of claim 9, wherein the name parsing is applied only to Chinese names that are six characters or shorter in length.

13. The computer program product of claim 9, wherein transliterating further comprises:

determining whether a character in a surname or a given name is context sensitive; and

in response to determining that the character is context sensitive, applying an exception rule to the character.

14. The computer program product of claim 9, wherein normalizing includes removing any diacritic symbols added during the parsing and transliteration steps.

15. The computer program product of claim 9, wherein identifying dual-character and single-character surnames is done in a left-to-right order.

16. The computer program product of claim 9, wherein the pre-determined representation is determined by an external application from which the Chinese name is received.

17. A system for Chinese name translation, comprising:

a parsing module operable to parse a received Chinese name into a surname and a given name by;

identifying any dual-character surnames in the received Chinese name, by referencing a list of known Chinese surnames,

identifying any single-character surnames in the received Chinese name, by referencing the list of known Chinese surnames, and

identifying, among the remaining characters in the received Chinese name, any characters not belonging to a dual-character or a single-character surname as a given name,

a transliteration module operable to transliterate the identified surname and the identified given name into a Mandarin Pinyin representation; and

a normalization module operable to normalize the Mandarin Pinyin representation of the surname and the given name into a pre-determined representation.

18. The system of claim 17, wherein the transliteration module uses an International Components for Unicode Han-Latin module.

19. The system of claim 17, wherein the parsing module uses a collection of common surnames to identify possible surname and given name patterns in the received Chinese name.

20. The system of claim 17, wherein the name parsing is applied only to Chinese names that are six characters or shorter in length.

21. The system of claim 17, wherein the transliteration module is further operable to:

determine whether a character in a surname or a given name is context sensitive; and

in response to determining that the character is context sensitive, apply an exception rule to the character.

22. The system of claim 17, wherein the normalization module is further operable to:

remove any diacritic symbols added by the parsing module and transliteration module.

23. The system of claim 17, wherein identifying dual-character and single-character surnames is done in a left-to-right order.

24. The system of claim 17, wherein the pre-determined representation is determined by an external application from which the Chinese name is received.