Procedural File: Transliteration.php

Page Details:

Copyright (c) 2006-2016 Khaled Al-Sham'aa.

http://www.ar-php.org

PHP Version 5

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LICENSE

This program is open source product; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Lesser General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public License along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl.txt>.

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Class Name: English-Arabic Transliteration

Filename: Transliteration.php

Original Author(s): Khaled Al-Sham'aa <khaled@ar-php.org>

Purpose: Transliterate English words into Arabic by render them in the orthography of the Arabic language and vise versa

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English-Arabic Transliteration

PHP class transliterate English words into Arabic by render them in the orthography of the Arabic language and vise versa.

Out of vocabulary (OOV) words are a common source of errors in cross language information retrieval. Bilingual dictionaries are often limited in their coverage of named- entities, numbers, technical terms and acronyms. There is a need to generate translations for these "on-the-fly" or at query time.

A significant proportion of OOV words are named entities and technical terms. Typical analyses find around 50% of OOV words to be named entities. Yet these can be the most important words in the queries. Cross language retrieval performance (average precision) reduced more than 50% when named entities in the queries were not translated.

When the query language and the document language share the same alphabet it may be sufficient to use the OOV word as its own translation. However, when the two languages have different alphabets, the query term must somehow be rendered in the orthography of the other language. The process of converting a word from one orthography into another is called transliteration.

Foreign words often occur in Arabic text as transliteration. This is the case for many categories of foreign words, not just proper names but also technical terms such as caviar, telephone and internet.

Example:

1.    include('./I18N/Arabic.php');
2.    $obj = new I18N_Arabic('Transliteration');
3.  
4.    $ar_word_1 = $obj->en2ar($en_word_1);
5.    $en_word_2 = $obj->ar2en($ar_word_2);

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