A machine transliteration tool between Uzbek alphabets

Abstract

Machine transliteration, as defined in this paper, is a process of automatically transforming written script of words from a source alphabet into words of another target alphabet within the same language, while preserving their meaning, as well as pronunciation. The main goal of this paper is to present a machine transliteration tool between three common scripts used in low-resource Uzbek language: the old Cyrillic, currently official Latin, and newly announced New Latin alphabets. The tool has been created using a combination of rule-based and fine-tuning approaches. The created tool is available as an open-source Python package, as well as a web-based application including a public API. To our knowledge, this is the first machine transliteration tool that supports the newly announced Latin alphabet of the Uzbek language.