Pinyin-to-character (P2C) conversion is the core component of pinyin-based Chinese input method engine (IME). However, the conversion is seriously compromised by the ambiguities of Chinese characters corresponding to pinyin as well as the predefined fixed vocabularies. To alleviate such inconveniences, we propose a neural P2C conversion model augmented by an online updated vocabulary with a sampling mechanism to support open vocabulary learning during IME working. Our experiments show that the proposed method outperforms commercial IMEs and state-of-the-art traditional models on standard corpus and true inputting history dataset in terms of multiple metrics and thus the online updated vocabulary indeed helps our IME effectively follows user inputting behavior.
 In order to overcome the difficulty in fusing more features into n-gram,a Pinyin-to-Character conversion model based on Support Vector Machines(SVM) is proposed in this paper,providing the ability of integrating more statistical information.Meanwhile,the excellent generalization performance effectively overcomes the overfitting problem existing in the traditional model,and the soft margin strategy overcomes the noise problem to some extent in the corpus.Furthermore,rough set theory is applied to extract complicated and long distance features,which are fused into SVM model as a new kind of feature,and solve the problem that traditional models suffer from fusing long distance dependency.The experimental result showed that this SVM Pinyin-to-Character conversion model achieved 1.2 higher precision than the trigram model,which adopted absolute smoothing algorithm,moreover,the SVM model with long distance features achieved 1.6 higher accuracy. Neural network language models (NNLMs) have been shown to outperform traditional ngram language model. However, too high computational cost of NNLMs becomes the main obstacle of directly integrating it into pinyin IME that normally requires a real-time response. In this paper, an efficient solution is proposed by converting NNLMs into back-off n-gram language models, and we integrate the converted NNLM into pinyin IME. Our experimental results show that the proposed method gives better decoding predictive performance for pinyin IME with satisfied efficiency. Kana-Kanji conversion is known as one of the representative applications of Natural Language Processing (NLP) for the Japanese language. The N-pos model, presenting the probability of a Kanji candidate sequence by the product of bi-gram Part-of-Speech (POS) probabilities and POS-to-word emission probabilities, has been successfully applied in a number of well-known Japanese Input Method Editor (IME) systems. However, since N-pos model is an approximation of n-gram word-based language model, important word-to-word collocation information are lost during this compression and lead to a drop of the conversion accuracies. In order to overcome this problem, we propose ways to improve current N-pos model. One way is to append the highfrequency collocations and the other way is to sub-categorize the huge POS sets to make them more representative. Experiments on large-scale data verified our proposals.  This paper introduces a new approach to solve the Chinese Pinyin-to-character (PTC) conversion problem. The conversion from Chinese Pinyin to Chinese character can be regarded as a transformation between two different languages (from the Latin writing system of Chinese Pinyin to the character form of Chinese,Hanzi), which can be naturally solved by machine translation framework. PTC problem is usually regarded as a sequence labeling problem, however, it is more difficult than any other general sequence labeling problems, since it requires a large label set of all Chinese characters for the labeling task. The essential difficulty of the task lies in the high degree of ambiguities of Chinese characters corresponding to Pinyins. Our approach is novel in that it effectively combines the features of continuous source sequence and target sequence. The experimental results show that the proposed approach is much faster, besides, we got a better result and outperformed the existing sequence labeling approaches. This paper addresses the problem of predicting the pronunciation of Japanese text. The difficulty of this task lies in the high degree of ambiguity in the pronunciation of Japanese characters and words. Previous approaches have either considered the task as a word-level classification problem based on a dictionary, which does not fare well in handling out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words; or solely focused on the pronunciation prediction of OOV words without considering the contextual disambiguation of word pronunciations in text. In this paper, we propose a unified approach within the framework of phrasal statistical machine translation (SMT) that combines the strengths of the dictionary-based and substring-based approaches. Our approach is novel in that we combine wordand character-based pronunciations from a dictionary within an SMT framework: the former captures the idiosyncratic properties of word pronunciation, while the latter provides the flexibility to predict the pronunciation of OOV words. We show that based on an extensive evaluation on various test sets, our model significantly outperforms the previous state-of-the-art systems, achieving around 90 accuracy in most domains. We present a discriminative structureprediction model for the letter-to-phoneme task, a crucial step in text-to-speech processing. Our method encompasses three tasks that have been previously handled separately: input segmentation, phoneme prediction, and sequence modeling. The key idea is online discriminative training, which updates parameters according to a comparison of the current system output to the desired output, allowing us to train all of our components together. By folding the three steps of a pipeline approach into a unified dynamic programming framework, we are able to achieve substantial performance gains. Our results surpass the current state-of-the-art on six publicly available data sets representing four different languages. 