Malay Framenet: An Application for Bilingual Dictionary

Boas (2009) has established that the recent trends in computational lexicography encompass computational methods and tools designed to assist in various lexicographical tasks,including the preparation of lexicographical evidence from many sources, the recording in database form of the relevant linguistic information, the editing of lexicographical entries and the dissemination of lexicographical products. In line with this development, Intan Safinaz’s research (2011) on frame-based analysis on Malay corpus has produced essential semantic information compiled in a reference database that can assist lexicographers in editing dictionary entries for Malay-English bilingual dictionaries. This paper aims to discuss the frame- based analysis that incorporated Frame Semantics methodology and the benefits of compiling the database as a reference database. The entry ‘memberi’ is analysed and the findings contribute to the semantic content of the reference database. This reference database is able to facilitate the task of editing entries of the Malay monolingual dictionaries, Malay-English bilingual dictionaries, as well as the Malay language reference books. This paper also discusses the possibility of building a Malay FrameNet based onthe architecture of the English FrameNet which was set up at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley. The proposed methods of building the Malay FrameNet is also inspired from the FrameNets of other languages for example the German, French and Japanese FrameNets. The setting up of the Malay FrameNet can be seen as an effort towards processing the Malay language and strengthening the Malay computational lexicography as well as encouraging future linguistic and computational lexicography research and cooperative efforts in natural language processing of the Malay language.