Mot\`aMot project: conversion of a French-Khmer published dictionary for building a multilingual lexical system

TL;DR

The MotàMot project develops a multilingual lexical system for Khmer by converting a French-Khmer dictionary into a digital, accessible resource, facilitating language processing and technological development in Cambodia.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method for digitizing and structuring Khmer lexical data using a pivot macrostructure and conversion techniques from a bilingual dictionary.

Findings

Created an online accessible lexical database for Khmer

Successfully converted Khmer headwords from IPA to Khmer script using OpenFST

Integrated French and Khmer lexical data into a multilingual system

Abstract

Economic issues related to the information processing techniques are very important. The development of such technologies is a major asset for developing countries like Cambodia and Laos, and emerging ones like Vietnam, Malaysia and Thailand. The MotAMot project aims to computerize an under-resourced language: Khmer, spoken mainly in Cambodia. The main goal of the project is the development of a multilingual lexical system targeted for Khmer. The macrostructure is a pivot one with each word sense of each language linked to a pivot axi. The microstructure comes from a simplification of the explanatory and combinatory dictionary. The lexical system has been initialized with data coming mainly from the conversion of the French-Khmer bilingual dictionary of Denis Richer from Word to XML format. The French part was completed with pronunciation and parts-of-speech coming from the FeM French-english-Malay dictionary. The Khmer headwords noted in IPA in the Richer dictionary were converted to Khmer writing with OpenFST, a finite state transducer tool. The resulting resource is available online for lookup, editing, download and remote programming via a REST API on a Jibiki platform.