Computational linguistics in Malaysia
Zaharin Yusoff · 2000
Computational linguistics in Malaysia began in early 1977 with the implementation of a morphological analyser for Malay for a Masters thesis at Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM) in Penang. The external examiner was Professor Bernard Vauquois from Groupe d'Etudes pour la Traduction Autonatique (GETA) in Grenoble, France. What started as an academic event led to a very long term collaboration between GETA and USM starting with the development of a prototype English-Malay machine translation (MT) system using GETA's ARIANE-78 system that further led to the development of various linguistic tools and language databanks as well as basic research on grammar formalisms. The collaboration continues to this day with the support of USM and the French government. The Computer Aided Translation Unit (known as UTMK) was set up in USM in 1984 and spearheads the collaboration from the Malaysian end. UTMK has slowed down considerably on MT but continues work on various other aspects of computational linguistics, their latest effort being on a search engine based on natural language processing techniques.