Knowledge Representation and Phonological Rules for the Automatic Transliteration of Balinese Script on Palm Leaf Manuscript

Abstract

Balinese ancient palm leaf manuscripts record many important knowledges about world civilization histories. They vary from ordinary texts to Bali’s most sacred writings. In reality, the majority of Balinese can not read it because of language obstacles as well as tradition which perceived them as a sacrilege. Palm leaf manuscripts attract the historians, philologists, and archaeologists to discover more about the ancient ways of life. But unfortunately, there is only a limited access to the content of these manuscripts, because of the linguistic difficulties. The Balinese palm leaf manuscripts were written in Balinese script in Balinese language, in the ancient literary texts composed in the old Javanese language of Kawi and Sanskrit. Balinese script is considered to be one of the most complex scripts from Southeast Asia. A transliteration engine for transliterating the Balinese script of palm leaf manuscript to the Latin-based script is one of the most demanding systems which has to be developed for the collection of palm leaf manuscript images. In this paper, we present an implementation of knowledge representation and phonological rules for the automatic transliteration of Balinese script on palm leaf manuscript. In this system, a rule-based engine for performing transliterations is proposed. Our model is based on phonetics which is based on traditional linguistic study of Balinese transliteration. This automatic transliteration system is needed to complete the optical character recognition (OCR) process on the palm leaf manuscript images, to make the manuscripts more accessible and readable to a wider audience.