ISTILAH SAINS: A Malay-English Terminology Retrieval System Experiment Using Stemming and N-grams Approach on Malay Words

Abstract

The emergence of global information society has increased the importance of translating articles from Malay to English, and vice-versa, to assist in the dissemination of information into and from South East Asia, mainly Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei where Malay language is widely used. This has created the need to have computer-aided translation tools to facilitate the translation process. In this article, the authors describe the design implementation, and evaluation of a Malay-English and English-Malay scientific terms retrieving software. The system was designed and implemented using object-oriented techniques with user friendly interfaces and some basic facilities. For example, the database maintainer can add, change or delete terms from the database, and reindex files. The general user can retrieved terms through the Internet using any browser with JAVA plug-in. The indexing and retrieving strategies are based on stemming and n-gram methods. The system was developed using JAVA language and thus Web enabled and can be accessed at http://www.ftsm.ukm.my/istilah/.