Malay Text Research Articles

Perfect wedding, penniless life: Ali and Fatima in a Sri Lankan Malay text

Literary depictions of central figures in Muslim history offer telling glimpses of gender roles and expectations, however ideal. Fatima, the Prophet Muhammad's daughter, and her pious and courageous husband and fourth Caliph Ali are among the most beloved and venerated of such figures across time and place. The Hikayat Siti Fatima, an 1865 Malay manuscript from Sri Lanka that depicts their heavenly marriage and earthly hardships, serves as the focus of a comparative analysis, offering insight into the circulation of gender images in Muslim South and Southeast Asia.

Reading on the Computer Screen: Does Font Type has Effects on Web Text Readability?

Reading on the World Wide Web has become a daily habit nowadays. This can be seen from the perspective of changes on readers’ tendency to be more interested in materials from the internet, than the printed media. Taking these developments into account, it is important for web-based instructional designers to choose the appropriate font, especially for long blocks of text, in order to enhance the level of students’ readability. Accordingly, this study aims to evaluate the effects of serif and san serif font in the category of screen fonts and print fonts, in terms of Malay text readability on websites. For this purpose, four fonts were selected, namely Georgia (serif) and Verdana (san serif) for the first respondents and Times New Roman (serif) and Arial (san serif) for the second respondents. Georgia and Verdana were designed for computer screens display. Meanwhile, Times New Roman and Arial were originally designed for print media. Readability test on a computer screen was conducted on 48 undergraduates. Overall, the results showed that there was no significant difference between the redability of serif and san serif font of both screen display category and print display category. Accordingly, the research findings and the literature overview, suggest that Verdana and followed by Georgia as the better choice in displaying long text on websites. Likewise, as anticipated, Times New Roman and Arial fonts provide good readability for print media, which reinfoces their status as the printing font category. However, with the current computer screen capability, it can still be an alternative option for instructional web developers.

Predicting Malay Prominent Syllable Using Support Vector Machine

Abstract The prediction of prominent syllable using Support Vector Machines (SVMs) is proposed in this paper. As much as 50 sentences out of 400 sentences from Malay syntax-prosody speech text has been selected as training and testing data set. SVM was trained to classify the prominent syllable in the sentences according to the feature presented. A prominent word can be categorized as prominent syllables but the prominent syllable has the potential not to classify as prominent word. Using training data, we trained it to obtain a model and the model will be used to predict instances with testing data set. The kernel function namely Radial Basis Function (RBF) is used to find the best cross validation accuracy of training data with parameter, C and γ. The SVM technique also compared with a Naive Bayes (NB) classifier and the comparison clearly claims that the proposed technique based architecture outperforms on all experiments. Using SVM classifier, the percentage accuracy of the classification archived rate of 88.7304% while 88.3024% using the Naive Bayes (NB). The results showed that SVM is conveniently classified because the performance shown is better than NB.

English and Malay Text Messages and What They Say about Texts and Cultures

This study of the pragmatics of cross-cultural text messages throws light on the evolution of new hybrid forms of literacy and on the complex ways that culture is expressed and mediated in second language/ second culture contexts. An investigation was carried out into the pragmatics of apology in first-language (L1) and second-language (L2) short messaging service text messages of adult Malay speakers who are proficient users of English, living and studying in an English-speaking university environment; and into L1 English users’ text apologies in the same context. Research questions included whether these proficient L2 English users would perform differently from L1 English users in this high-stakes speech act, and from their own L1 Malay use; and whether apologies in what has been called a hybrid medium would differ from those previously studied in writing, in speech and in other electronic media. Twenty-six native speakers of English and 26 native speakers of Malay responded via text messages to discourse completion tests (DCTs) in L1; the DCTs represented either high or low levels of offence calling for apologies. The Malay native speakers also responded to apology situations in L2 English. Data were coded using an adapted version of Cohen and Olshtain’s (1981) coding scheme. Analysis of the messages sent by participants revealed clear signs of a hybrid type of text that is differently conceptualised by the two communities. It also showed that the Malay users’ second language literacy was shaped in a complex way that sometimes accommodated the second language/second culture and sometimes retained first language/first culture values.

Experiments on the Use of Feature Selection and Machine Learning Methods in Automatic Malay Text Categorization

Abstract Due to the rapid growth of documents in digital form, research in automatic text categorization into predefined categories has witnessed a booming interest. Although, there is a wide range of supervised machine learning methods have been applied to categorize English, relatively, only a few studies have been done on Malay text categorization. This paper reports our comparative evaluation of three machine learning methods on Malay text categorization. Two feature selection methods (Information gain (IG) and Chi-square) and three machine learning methods (K-Nearest Neighbor (k-NN), Naive Bayes (NB) and N-gram) were investigated. The three supervised machine learning models were evaluated on categorized Malay corpus, and experimental results showed that the k- NN with the Chi-square feature selection gave the best performance (Macro-F1 = 96.14).

Legitimacy of the Malays as the Sons of the Soil

This paper presents evidence to defend the Malay as legitimate sons of the soil. The arguments are supported by linguistic, archeological, paleoanthropological, prehistorian, botanical, genetic and forensic evidence. The bulk of the sources on indigenous concept of the sons of the soil are the Malay classical texts. Based those sources, it is argued that the Malays are entitled to be regarded as legitimate sons of the soil, firstly, their ancestors were not migrants, instead originated from the Nusantara region; secondly, their ancestors were the first who constituted the political establishment or effective administration in Nusantara in general and in Malaysia in particular; thirdly, the status of the Malay masses as the sons of the soil had been legitimized by the Malay Sultanates, a single supreme authority over all matter on the Malay sovereignty of all time till today; and, fourthly, the Malay themselves constituted the concept of sons of the soil and also the geo-political entity called Tanah Melayu (the Malay Land) long before the coming of foreign influences.

Konsep Kemakmuran Negara dalam Historiografi Melayu Islam Kurun ke-13 hingga ke-19

Literature of Malay Muslim historiography is one of the most essential historical resources in studying the history of Malay community, especially from the 13th to 19th century. Main texts such as Hikayat Raja Pasai (Chronicle King of Pasai), Sejarah Melayu (The Malay Annals), Hikayat Aceh, Peringatan Sejarah Negeri Johor, Hikayat Siak, Tuhfat al-Nafis represent numbers of streams in Islamic Malay historiography embedded in diversity of countries and time. These texts encompass info of the lifestyle of a society, aspect of economy and intellectual, politics, religion etc. Thus, analysis of these information assist us in understanding further the concept of the state existed during that period, including the concept of national peace or tranquility and secession and its main criteria. Furthermore, research of ancient Malay texts show that these concepts has strong relations to the characteristics of the ruler (e.g. just - unjust ruler) and the ways king rule their country as Islamic countries or states. Hence, these two concepts summarized in those texts are recognized as among of the concept of justice based on the principle of idealistic of Islamic government (Ideal Islamic state).

From Kitaab-Hollandsch to Kitaab-Afrikaans: The evolution of a non-white literary variety at the Cape (1856-1940)

This paper presents the socio-historical and linguistic context of Muslim Cape Dutch/Afrikaans literature, using the same texts as in Stell, Luffin, and Rakiep (2007). It then focuses on the areas of greatest diachronic variation in the phonology, lexicon, idiomaticity, morphology, and syntax of the Cape Malay texts. Finally, it attempts to place that variation within the perspective of the evolution of Cape Dutch/Afrikaans.

OPTIMIZING CLUSTERS ALIGNMENT FOR BILINGUAL MALAY-ENGLISH CORPORA

Bilingual corpora, containing the same documents in two different languages, are becoming an essential resource for natural language processing. Clustering bilingual corpora provides us with an insight into the differences between languages when term frequency-based Information Retrieval (IR) tools are used. It also allows one to use the Natural Language Processing (NLP) and IR tools in one language to implement IR for another language. This study reports on our work on applying Hierarchical Agglomerative Clustering (HAC) to a large corpus of documents where each appears both in Malay and English languages. These documents are clustered for each language and both results are compared with respect to the content of clusters produced. Further, the effects of using different methods of computing the inter-clusters distance on the cluster results is also studied. These methods include Single, Complete and Average links. Finally, this study describes an experiment employing a genetic algorithm to fine-tune individual term’s weight in order to reproduce more closely a predefined set of clusters. In this way, clustering becomes a supervised learning technique that is trained to better reproduce known clusters in Malay language when applied to the corresponding documents in English language. On the data available, the results of clustering one language resemble the other, provided the number of clusters required is relatively small. The method used to compute the inter-clusters distance also influences the cluster results. The result actually showed an increase in the percentage of aligned clusters, when we applied the genetic algorithm to fine-tune weights of terms considered in clustering the bilingual Malay-English corpora. This study concludes that with a smaller number of clusters, k = 5, all of the clusters from English texts can be mapped into the clusters of Malay texts, by using the Complete link distance measure in clustering the bilingual parallel corpus. In contrast, with a large size of clusters, fewer clusters from English texts can be mapped into the clusters of Malay texts.

The Secret Life of Nora (review)

Reviewed by: The Secret Life of Nora Zulkifli Mohamad The Secret Life of Nora. Produced by Enfiniti Vision Media Productions with story by Raymond Miranda and Malay text by Mamat Khalid, music by Roslan Aziz, lyrics by Alfi an Sa’at, directed by Steven Dexter, choreographed by Pat Ibrahim, 29 September–22 October 2011. The Secret Life of Nora is recent addition to the growing roster of Malay musicals. To understand this particular production one needs to first understand the history and genesis of the new Malay musical, which has been a major trend since the establishment of Istana Budaya (Malaysia’s national theatre, literally, “Palace of Culture”). Istana Budaya launched this new venue in 1999 with a new musical, Keris Sang Puteri (Dagger of the Princess), directed by Rahim Razali (formerly a film director) using the Malay aesthetics borrowed from bangsawan (nineteenth-century Malay opera) with new staging facilities at the theatre. The intention of making Istana Budaya an important performance venue similar to Sydney Opera House had been expressed by the minister of culture and tourism at the time, Dato’ Sabaruddin Chik. He challenged theatre practitioners to start producing musical theatre similar to West End and Broadway productions and to modernize bangsawan to suit modern and urban audiences. For more than a decade now many musicals have been produced, especially ones looking back at Malay historical figures, from fifteenth-century Melaka (Malacca) heroes to present day prime ministers and politicians. These productions are valued since they bring in a large audience, filling the house. Indeed the musical has almost become a new definition of theatre in Malaysia—that is, requiring a big budget, big audience, and long run to break even. Musicals are also are seen now as a new medium for former film and pop stars to continue making new work as they are paid handsomely by the [End Page 461] Ministry of Culture since they have the public attraction quality and at the same time bring private sponsorship and media attention. (Meanwhile, of course, serious theatre practitioners, critics, and playwrights may think that musical is killing the real activity of theatre-making in Malaysia, especially among young activists.) What’s interesting with Enfiniti Productions, the company sponsoring this musical, is the way they have indigenized their productions musically, making the work relevant to both the West End’s and Broadway’s models and local needs. The inclusion of local Malay music producer-composer Roslan Aziz has given their musical a new flavor of Malay pop music, making it relevant to the local music scene. The Secret Life of Nora is inspired by Agent 001—Nora Zain, a 1967 Malay spy movie produced by Shaw Brothers Singapore branch, the top producer of Malay cinema in 1950s and 1960s, which was still producing works of glitz and glamor (though Singapore had exited from Malaysia in 1965). One of the few spy films produced by Shaw Brothers for the Malay market, Agent 001 included Hong Kong personnel, including director Lo Wei, who would in 1971 direct Bruce Lee’s first martial arts feature. Despite the obvious precedent, The Secret Life of Nora claims to be an original script that has nothing to do with the actual character of Nora Zain, the female spy in the original film. The musical plot concerns a female cabaret performer in 1960s Malaya, Nora (Tiara Jacqueline, formerly known as Jacqueline Eu). Farouk (Tony Eusoff), the Malaysian agent, recruits her on the pretext of remaking a “Nora Zain” film. The title character, Nora, who aspires to be a film star, becomes an actress playing a spy. She is trained by a “director” who is actually a spy trainer from Hong Kong named Roger Foss (played by Broadway actor Ryan Silverman, who was seen in the 2010 Turkish/U.S. film Five Minarets). What starts as play acting becomes serious business as the would-be diva finds herself enmeshed in and eventually smashing networks of human trafficking as she falls for this demanding man. This production, drawing on local audiences’ memory of past films, follows a pattern of theatre production at Istana Budaya in the past few years: more and more films are turned into musicals...

Circulating Women as Objects of Trade in Malay Historical Texts

AbstractIn this paper, we shall discuss ‘circulating women’ as objects of trade based on the corpus of three historical texts such as The Malay Annals (Sejarah Melayu) and Misa Melayu Perak. Barbara Andaya (2006:104) has cogently argued that “Southeast Asia is an attractive laboratory to investigate women’s economic roles” especially in the early modern period. By focusing on issues related to marriage and slave trade, we look specifically at the movements of women in the chronicles. Whether they were consorts, concubines and maids-in-waiting in the Malay courts, the traffic of women showed an intricate web of social exchange where symmetrical and asymmetrical reciprocity took place in various political situations of the day. By showing these exchanges, we unveil an aspect of women and trade in early modern Southeast Asia where women were involved in boosting male prestige and power, political hierarchy, social identity and legitimacy.

Use of Comparable Corpus in Teaching Translation

Comparable corpus is defined as a collection of texts in one language together with texts translated into the same language. Comparable corpus presents the opportunity to discover features that occur more frequently in translated texts or ‘translation universals’. In the Malaysian context, several studies have attempted to look at these translation universals or looking at patterns in Malay translation corpus and compared them to a corpus of original (non-translated) Malay. This paper focuses on the linguistic nature of Malay preposition ‘untuk’. A linguistic analysis has revealed divergent usage patterns of ‘untuk’ between Malay translation and Malay original text. Such finding is important for it contributes to the teaching and training of translators.

Frequencies Determination of Characters for Bahasa Melayu: Results of Preliminary Investigations

Bahasa Melayu (Malay language) is a language spoken in Malaysia and many countries around it. It has rich literature and deep roots in culture. Bahasa Melayu language uses roman character set (i.e. A-Z) identical to English language. The written language uses the character set as building blocks to build word, sentences and phrases along with special punctuations and signs to create documents of interest. In this paper, results of preliminary investigation of Malay text documents are provided. For this purpose scanning of articles written upon various topics in Malay were carried out. Approximately 31 thousand characters from different articles are scanned. Preliminary observations indicate that on average, character “A” occurs 19%, character “N” occur 10%, character “E” occur “9%”and character “I” 8% in text. However, it is also observed from the data that, these are the characters from over all set with highest frequencies of occurrences and it is expected that during further investigation they will remain as higher frequency occurring characters. Furthermore, the results indicate that for Bahasa Melayu characters appearance in text is very close in character frequencies of Bahasa Indonesia, but having different appearance of characters than English language. The investigation also indicate that these two languages, Bahasa Melayu and Bahasa Indonesia share close phonetic structure but not English, though all three use same character set.

A hybrid approach for learning concept hierarchy from Malay text using artificial immune network

A concept hierarchy is an integral part of an ontology but it is expensive and time consuming to build. Motivated by this, many unsupervised learning methods have been proposed to (semi-) automatically develop a concept hierarchy. A significant work is the Guided Agglomerative Hierarchical Clustering (GAHC) which relies on linguistic patterns (i.e., hypernyms) to guide the clustering process. However, GAHC still relies on contextual features to build the concept hierarchy, thus data sparsity still remains an issue in GAHC. Artificial Immune Systems are known for robustness, noise tolerance and adaptability. Thus, an extension to the GAHC is proposed by hybridizing it with Artificial Immune Network (aiNet) which we call Guided Clustering and aiNet for Learning Concept Hierarchy (GCAINY). In this paper, we have tested GCAINY using two parameter settings. The first parameter setting is obtained from the literature as a baseline parameter setting and second is by automatic parameter tuning using Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). The effectiveness of the GCAINY is evaluated on three data sets. For further validations, a comparison between GCAINY and GAHC has been conducted and with statistical tests showing that GCAINY increases the quality of the induced concept hierarchy. The results reveal that the parameters value found by using PSO significantly produce better concept hierarchy than the vanilla parameter. Thus it can be concluded that the proposed approach has greater ability to be used in the field of ontology learning.

PROCESSING NATURAL MALAY TEXTS: A DATA-DRIVEN APPROACH

This research represents the first attempt to produce a working system for the automatic processing of texts of Bahasa Melayu 'Malay'. At the heart of the system is an integrated relational lexical database called MALEX, which draws on the experience of working on English and other languages, but which is specifically tailored to the conditions of Malay. The development of the database is from the beginning entirely data driven, and is based on the analysis of a corpus of naturally produced Malay texts. In designing procedures which access the database, properties of the text are consistently and rigorously distinguished from properties of the lexicon and of the grammar. The system is currently used to provide information for a range of applications, for grammatical tagging, stemming and lemmatisation, parsing, and for generating phonological representations. It is hoped and intended that the design features of MALEX will be transferable, and provide a model for the development of working systems for other Asian languages.

Corpus Design for Malay Corpus-based Speech Synthesis System

Problem statement: Speech corpus is one of the major components in corpus-based synthesis. The quality and coverage in speech corpus will affect the quality of synthesis speech sound. Approach: This study proposes a corpus design for Malay corpus-based speech synthesis system. This includes the study of design criteria in corpus-based speech synthesis, Malay corpus based database design and the concatenation engine in Malay corpus-based synthesis system. A set of 10 millions digital text corpuses for Malay language has been collected from Malay internet news. This text corpus had been analyzed using word frequency count to find out all high frequency words to be used for designing the sentences for speech corpus. Results: Altogether 381 sentences for speech corpus had been designed using 70% of high frequency words from 10 million text corpus. It consists of 16826 phoneme units and the total storage size is 37.6Mb. All the phone units are phonetically transcribed to preserve the phonetic context of its origin that will be used for phonetic context unit. This speech corpus had been labeled at phoneme level and used for variable length continuous phoneme based concatenation. Speech corpus is one of the major components in corpus-based synthesis. The quality and coverage in speech corpus will affect the quality of synthesized speech sound. Conclusion/Recommendation: This study has proposed a platform for designing speech corpus especially for Malay Text to Speech which can be further enhanced to support more coverage and higher naturalness of synthetic speech.

Menghapus citra buruk njai dalam karya-karya fiksi berbahasa Melayu (1896-1927)

In the Dutch colonial literature of the mid nineteenth century, the njai (Asian concubine) is the symbol of degeneration and of undermining colonial society in the Dutch Indies. Opposed to this portrayal, in Malay literature the image of the njai is on the whole positive: she is faithful and loyal to her partner, intelligent, and economical. However, she easily falls victim to external powers, which is often the masculine power of the society she belongs to. In many Malay texts she is represented as ready to fight back, primarily for the sake of the future of her offspring(s) or herself. Sometimes she succumbs, sometimes she triumphs. Examples can be found in texts like Tjerita Njai Dasima (1896), Tjerita Nji Paina (1900), Seitang Koening (1906), Hikajat Raden Adjeng Badaroesmi (1901-1903), Tjerita Njai Isah (1904), and Boenga roos dari Tjikembang (1927). These texts represent a re-evaluation of the njai and stand in opposition to nineteenth century Dutch colonial literature.

Implementation of Phonetic Context Variable Length Unit Selection Module for Malay Text to Speech

Problem statement: The main problem with current Malay Text-To-Speech (MTTS) synthesis system is the poor quality of the generated speech sound due to the inability of traditional TTS system to provide multiple choices of unit for generating more accurate synthesized speech. Approach: This study proposes a phonetic context variable length unit selection MTTS system that is capable of providing more natural and accurate unit selection for synthesized speech. It implemented a phonetic context algorithm for unit selection for MTTS. The unit selection method (without phonetic context) may encounter the problem of selecting the speech unit from different sources and affect the quality of concatenation. This study proposes the design of speech corpus and unit selection method according to phonetic context so that it can select a string of continuous phoneme from same source instead of individual phoneme from different sources. This can further reduce the concatenation point and increase the quality of concatenation. The speech corpus was transcribed according to phonetic context to preserve the phonetic information. This method utilizes word base concatenation method. Firstly it will search through the speech corpus for the target word, if the target is found; it will be used for concatenation. If the word does not exist, then it will construct the words from phoneme sequence. Results: This system had been tested with 40 participants in Mean Opinion Score (MOS) listening test with the average rates for naturalness, pronunciation and intelligibility are 3.9, 4.1 and 3.9. Conclusion/Recommendation: Through this study, a very first version of Corpus-based MTTS has been designed; it has improved the naturalness, pronunciation and intelligibility of synthetic speech. But it still has some lacking that need to be perfected such as the prosody module to support the phrasing analysis and intonation of input text to match with the waveform modifier.

Between Iron Formalism and Playful Relativism: Five Recent Studies in Malay Writing

The heritage of traditional Malay literature: A historical survey of genres, writings, and literary views By VLADIMIR BRAGINSKY Leiden: KITLV Press, 2004. Pp. xiv, 890. Notes, Bibliography, Index.John Leyden's Malay Annals With an introductory essay by VIRGINIA MATHESON HOOKER and M. B. HOOKER Kuala Lumpur: MBRAS, 2001. Pp. 81, 361. Notes, Bibliography, Index.We are playing relatives: A survey of Malay writing By HENK MAIER Leiden: KITLV Press, 2004. Pp. viii, 542. Notes, Bibliography, Index.Bidasari: Jewel of Malay Muslim culture Edited by JULIAN MILLIE Leiden: KITLV Press, 2004. Pp. 310. Notes, Bibliography, Index.A merry senhor in the Malay world: Four texts of the Syair Sinyor Kosta Edited by A. TEEUW, R. DUMAS, MUHAMMAD HAJI SALLEH, R. TOL and M. J. VAN YPEREN Leiden: KITLV Press, 2004. Pp. x, 467. Notes, Bibliography, Index.

Back to basics

SecEdVol. 2006, No. 11 OthersBack to basicsNancy KnowltonNancy KnowltonSearch for more papers by this authorNancy KnowltonPublished Online:28 Jan 2014https://doi.org/10.12968/sece.2006.11.755AboutSectionsView articleView Full TextView EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack CitationsPermissions ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail View article FiguresReferencesRelatedDetailsCited byText Summarization10 February 2022A SYNTACTIC-BASED SENTENCE VALIDATION TECHNIQUE FOR MALAY TEXT SUMMARIZER11 June 2021 | Journal of Information and Communication Technology, Vol. 20, No. Number 3Getting to Africa’s Demographic Dividend7 April 2021Query-based multi-documents summarization using linguistic knowledge and content word expansion23 September 2015 | Soft Computing, Vol. 21, No. 7Extracting easy to understand summary using differential evolution algorithmSwarm and Evolutionary Computation, Vol. 16Arabic/English Multi-document Summarization with CLASSY—The Past and the Future 1 November 2006Volume 2006Issue 11ISSN (print): 1479-7704ISSN (online): 2755-290X Metrics History Published online 28 January 2014 Published in print 1 November 2006 Information© MA Education Ltd 2006