---
title: "Phonetic Models for Generating Spelling Variants"
authors:
  - "Rahul Bhagat"
  - "Eduard H. Hovy"
doi: ""
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2007/253"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2007/0253.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Twentieth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 2007
pages: "1570-1574"
track: ""
keywords:
---

# Phonetic Models for Generating Spelling Variants

Rahul Bhagat, Eduard H. Hovy

*Proceedings of the Twentieth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*, pages 1570-1574.

## Abstract

Proper names, whether English or non-English, have several different spellings when transliterated from a non-English source language into English. Knowing the different variations can significantly improve the results of name-searches on various source texts, especially when recall is important. In this paper we propose two novel phonetic models to generate numerous candidate variant spellings of a name. Our methods show threefold improvement over the baseline and generate four times as many good name variants compared to a human while maintaining a respectable precision of 0.68.