Design and construction of a machine-tractable Malay-English lexicon.

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce a machine-tractable Malay-English lexicon currently

being developed at NTT MSC, Malaysia. The lexicon is designed to satisfy

three criteria: Firstly, to develop and document detailed syntactic features

useful for both analysis and generation. Secondly, to use a well-developed

semantic ontology, in our case the semantic classes from the 2,710 classes used

in the machine-tractable Japanese-English Goi-Taikei ontology. Thirdly, to get

as wide cover as possible. The lexicon currently contains around 91,000

Malay-English pairs. Each entry consists of nine major fields, which include

such information as numeral classifiers associated with common nouns, and

meta-codes to show honorific use, register and origin. In addition, English and

Chinese translations and comments are provided for future use in machine

translation systems and also as an aid for non-Malay speakers. A version of the

dictionary, which does not show all fields, is available on-line.