We propose a bootstrapping approach to training a memoriless stochastic transducer for the task of extracting transliterations from an English-Arabic bitext. The transducer learns its similarity metric from the data in the bitext, and thus can function directly on strings written in different writing scripts without any additional language knowledge. We show that this bootstrapped transducer performs as well or better than a model designed specifically to detect Arabic-English transliterations. .
