THE DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF THE MALAY-ARABIC ONLINE

MULTIMEDIA DICTIONARY ON SMART PHONES.

Khirulnizam Abd Rahman, Azrehan Abd Aziz, Syuria Amirrudin,

Juzlinda Mohd Ghazali, C. W. Shamsul Bahri C. W. Ahmad, Mohamad Haron Husaini

Kolej Universiti Islam Antarabangsa Selangor

Bandar Seri Putra, 43600, Bangi, Selangor, Malaysia
khirulnizam@gmail.com

Abstract

There are a lot of dictionaries available in the market. However, it‘s hard to find a Malay-
Arabic dictionary complete with picture or video to visualize what is the word represent, and
pronunciation in voice. Thus, the researchers developed and implemented a Malay-Arabic
online multimedia dictionary for beginner (OMMAr). The user is able to enter a Malay word
and if the word matches any of the entry in the database system, the meaning in Arabic will
be displayed with the picture or video and the sound for the word pronunciation. If there is no
match, the system will propose similar words. The system is also capable of the doing the
same for Arabic words. The technology used is client-server technology where the mobile
device (Smartphone) is the client, and there is a web server to facilitate the lookup table
(database) and storage for the audio-visual aids. This paper will present the design of
OMMAr on Smartphone which uses the UTF-8 character encoding to store the Arabic words.
There is a special treatment to the web pages, the web server, and also the database. The web
pages use UTF-8 HTML encoding while the web server needs a special function to translate
the HTML code into UTF-8. To store the Arabic characters, the database‘s collation also
need to be set to UTF-8. The authors use the Flash format for the videos and the sounds,
while the images are in JPEG, GIF or PNG format. This paper is to report the design,
implementation and testing of the systems user interface on several popular Smartphone
devices.

Keywords: online dictionary, Malay-Arabic online dictionary, UTF-8 characters transaction,

online multimedia dictionary, mobile based dictionary.

1. Introduction

Dictionary is a book that lists the words of a language in alphabetical order and gives their
meaning, or their equivalent in a different language (Oxford Dictionary). Since dictionary is
supposed to be a book (as defined by Oxford Dictionary), so a dictionary that is available
online, such as Merriam-Webster.com, is an online dictionary. As the word online is also
related to computer, this online dictionary must also possess the fast searching features. What
the researchers are doing is to capitalize the strength of computer processing to enhance the
old version of dictionary (in papers) into a rich multimedia dictionary. The application is
equipped with the audio of the word‘s pronunciation to help the user pronounce the word and
pictures or video to visualize what the word represents.

Evolution of information technology and communication (ICT) today did affect many
development of dictionary that can be installed and used in mobile devices. There are several
example of dictionary that can be accessed through mobile. There are LookWAYup mobile
dictionary (http://lookwayup.com), SABC Mobile Dictionary (Mobidic)

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(www.sabcmobile.co.za/mobidic.htm), MOT Mobile Dictionary (www.kielikone.fi/en) and
MSDict English Phrases Dictionary (S60) 4.10 (www.brothersoft.com/mobile/msdict-
english-phrases-dictionary - (s60)). This all version of dictionaries build in type of software
that can be access through mobile. LookWAYup is a one of website that provide online
dictionary and it‘s suitable for all types of society. LookWAYup also provide online
dictionary for wireless PDA or mobile namely LookWAYup mobile dictionary. This
dictionary provides ease of translation variety language like French to English, German to
English, Spanish to English and on the other hand SABC Mobile Dictionary (Mobidic) is the
one in South Africa. MobiDic allow mobile user to access the dictionary contents through
their mobile. It requires user to send SMS that contain words to be translated to the number
provided and received a suitable meaning.

Besides that there are some versions of dictionary that need to be installed into mobile as a
program like MOT Mobile Dictionary. These dictionary was developed to help business user
to use language in their daily job. For MSDict English Phrases Dictionary (S60) 4.10, it has
many phrases, word arrangements and basic quotes.

2. The challenges

2.1 Information retrieval for Arabic characters in the Web.

We face difficulties to manipulate the Arabic words, especially in the process of saving and
searching the word entries. So we use one of the Unicode character sets, which is the UTF-8
to represent the Arabic words. However, UTF-8 character sets need some special treatment to
manipulate them correctly in the Web environment. The problem and solution is thoroughly
discussed by Khirulnizam et al., 2008 [CAMP2008].

2.2 Producing the multimedia elements.

The researchers produce the images and the sound manually. The sound is developed in a
recording studio, where voice is recorded, edited and noise is filtered manually. There are
technologies available to automatically convert text (Malay or Arabic) into sound; such as
Malay TTS by Tan (2004), SMaTTS by Othman et al. (2007) and ATTS by Elshafaei (2004).
However we have not looked into it seriously. The images are also developed manually.

2.3 Producing the mobile version.

The previous system is available in regular web interface. However for the mobile device
version, the system needs to be downgraded to suit the small screens. The JavaScript
onscreen keyboard application is also customized. Another problem that occur is the Flash
application to produce the sound. Since the application is in Flash, there are several smart
phone devices that do not support it such as iPhone. This is the main challenge that has not
been resolved yet.

3. Design of the Proposed System

The system is developed using PHP script as the middleware, running on Apache web server.
The interfaces are on HTML and the database is residing in MySQL 5 database server.

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3.1 Schematic Diagram

Network

Client-side Server-side
Figure 1: The schematic diagram of the application.

3.2 The database design

The entity relationship diagram in Figure 1 is the database design. We use the MySQL
version 5 because it has the capability to handle UTF-8 character set which is a must have
feature since we store Arabic characters.

Figure 2: The entity-relationship diagram of the database.

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3.2 Functional flow

Begin

User key-in word (Malay or

Arabic)

Send the word to the server

Search for the word

Word No Send ―no match found‖

found
message

Yes Suggest similar words

Send the translation / voice/

animation / video to the
client

End

Figure 3: The application‘s functional flow.

3.1.1 Malay words entry

Table MalayWords contains the field to hold the values of Malay words, the root word,
meaning of the word and the file path for the audio visual aids (image, pronunciation and
video). It also has the information of the word type; whether it‘s a noun, verb or adverb.

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The multimedia elements for this system are not directly saved to the database. The files are
located in another directory in the system‘s directory. The information saved in the database
is only the file names.

3.1.2 Arabic words entry

Another important table is to hold the word entry for Arabic, the meaning, the word with
diacritic, the root word and the file path for the audio visual aids (image, pronunciation and
video). The diacritic version of the word is also provided in case the audio file is not available
or not working properly. Diacritic is a special notation in Arabic character to help non-Arabic
tongue to easily recognize the correct pronunciation of the word.

3.1.3 The Word-Joiner

This table is actually a composite entity derived to link a Malay word to the meaning in
Arabic, and vice-versa.

3.2 The system’s algorithm

This system has two major search features; the Malay, and the Arabic word search. Figure 4
shows the algorithm for the Malay word searching. This section will display the Arabic word
or the suggested similar Arabic word to the user. It also provides the image and the audio aid
of the word‘s pronunciation.

Figure 4: The Malay word search algorithm.

Figure 5 is the algorithm used in doing the search for Arabic word. The user will get the
Malay word as the output, and all the audio and visual aids.

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 Figure 5: The Arabic word search algorithm.

4. Testing

4.1 The web interfaces

These are the screen shots taken from the application prototype that has been developed
(Figure 6, 7, 8 and 9). Figure 7 is the interface to receive user request to search Malay word.
User has the option of selecting the exact word, contains the search request or begins with the
search request.

The result of the search is displayed in Figure 8 if the word is found. Click ‗lanjut‘ (details) to
view the multimedia content. All the voices and image is displayed in Figure 9.

The keyboard is provided in Arabic search request page, Figure 10. This keyboard is to
facilitate the user who does not have the physical Arabic keyboard.

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 Figure 6: Interface for Malay-Arabic Online Mobile Dictionary

Figure 7: The user interface to enter the Malay word by the user.

Figure 8: The search result.

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 Figure 9: The audio and visual support to represent the word.

Figure 10: The user interface to enter the Arabic word by the user.

4.2 Testing the interface under several popular mobile devices.

The testing was done only on mobile device environment using three types of mobile devices
which are Symbian, iPhone, and Windows Mobile. The result is as shown in Table 1. The
symbol ―√‖ represents capable, while ―X‖ is unable to perform.

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 Table 1: The testing of the application interfaces against several popular mobile devices.

Platform
iPhone (using Windows Mobile
Symbian
Functions Safari on (Mobile IE on
(Nokia E63)
iPhone 3Gs) HTC Touch)
Display Arabic √ √
√
words
Receive Arabic √ √
√
words
Search Arabic √ √
√
words
Arabic on-page √ √
√
keyboard
Pronunciation √ X √

5. Discussion on Prototype Testing

Most of Smartphone‘s browser that support Unicode and Flash will not have problems in
accessing the application. By default iPhone does not support Flash. That‘s the main reason
why the pronunciation does not perform properly on iPhone. The pronunciation‘s interface is
developed using Flash.

The testing provides a positive outcome for this prototype application. There are a lot more
platform to test. Another future work is to add more entries, develop more audio, visual aid
(animation and video) for more Arabic and Malay words. The prototype is accessible from
http://bit.ly/mommar/ .

6. Acknowledgement

This research is funded under the Research and Development grant, provided by Kolej
Universiti Islam Antarabangsa Selangor, Bandar Seri Putra, Bangi, Selangor.

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