The edit operations include: (M)atching an element in S with an element in T; (I)nserting an element into T, and (D)eleting an element in S. 1 The generation task is part of the NEWS 2009 machine transliteration shared task<cite> (Li et al., 2009)</cite> Based on all representative symbols used for each of the two languages, emission costs for each of the edit operations and transition parameters can be estimated and used in measuring the similarity between two strings.