With the rapid growth of the Internet data and the dramatic changes in the user demographics especially among the non-English speaking parts of the world, machine transliteration is important in many cross-lingual NLP, MT and CLIR applications as their performances have been shown to positively correlate with the correct conversion of names between the languages in several studies (Demner-Fushman and Oard, 2002;Mandl and Womser-Hacker, 2005;Hermjakob et al., 2008;Udupa et al., 2009).
the traditional source for name equivalence, the bilingual dictionarieswhether handcrafted or statistical built offer only limited support because new names always emerge.