Machine Transliteration is to transcribe a word written in a script with approximate phonetic equivalence in another language. It is useful for machine translation, cross-lingual information retrieval, multilingual text and speech processing. Punjabi Machine Transliteration (PMT) is a special case of machine transliteration and is a process of converting a word from Shahmukhi (based on Arabic script) to Gurmukhi (derivation of Landa, Shardha and Takri, old scripts of Indian subcontinent), two scripts of Punjabi, irrespective of the type of word. .
