I am invited to write something in this blog. As the design of the ACL-IJCNLP 2009 conference bag was just out. I decided to write something about the bag, Singapore, and transliteration. In natural language processing, transliteration is to rewrite a word in a different writing system using phonetic equivalents.
The English word Singapore is derived from a Malay word Singapura or literally Lion City, which was given in the 13th century by a prince from Palembang when he was shipwrecked on the island and saw a creature that he believed was a lion. Following the Chinese translation principle that “Names should follow their bearers, while things should follow Chinese”, the Malay word Singapura is transliterated into 新加坡 (Xin1 Jia1 Po1 in Hanyu Pinyin), which carries forward the original pronunciation, as the country’s official Chinese name, as opposed to the literal translation 狮城. While studying transliteration, let me give you a preview of the ACL-IJCNLP 2009 conference bag – a special design to feature the name of the country in 4 official languages of Singapore, namely English, Chinese, Malay and Tamil.
ACL-IJCNLP '09 Conference Bag
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This post is contributed by Haizhou Li, who is the Local Organizing Chair of ACL-IJCNLP ‘09. He is currently a Principal Scientist and Nokia Professor in Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R), Singapore. He is also the Department Head of Human Language Technology in I2R and Programme Manager of Social Robotics in A*STAR. His research interests include automatic speech recognition, machine translation, and robotics.