1. Khirulnizam Abd Rahman
Faculty of Science and Technology
Universiti Sains Islam Malaysia
khirulnizam@gmail.com
http://khirulnizam.com

2. 1. Introduction
2. Previous Works
3. The Design
4. Discussions
5. Conclusions

3.  A proverb is a short, generally known
sentence of the folk which contains wisdom,
truth, morals, and traditional views in a
metaphorical, fixed and memorisable form
and which is handed down from generation to
generation” (Mieder 1993, p. 5 and 24f.).
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4.  Proverbs (peribahasa) in Malay language are
beautiful elements to deliver advices, Malay
teachings, moral values and comparison
through metaphoric phrases
 There are four categories of Malay proverbs
(as described by Abdullah & Ainon, 2011)
which are simpulan bahasa, perumpamaan,
bidalan and pepatah.

5. Malay Proverbs Meaning in English
Kalau kamu tunggu sehingga Even if you waited forever,
kucing bertanduk sekali pun, Aminah will not live again.
Aminah tidak akan hidup
kembali.
Anak di rumah kelaparan kera Helping others are more
di hutan disusukan. important than helping your
own next to kin.
5

6.  Proverb Detection – the apps was developed
to experiment the detection proverb in
sentence/paragraph using the pattern
matching approach.
 The mobile platform is just one of the
environment to test.
 There’s also the web-based version.

7.  Multiword Malay Indexing (Rais et. al, 2011)
 Malay Proverb Dictionary (Supyan et. al, 2004)
 Hindi to Urdu Proverbs Translation
(Brahmaleen et. al, 2010)
 German-English Idioms Treatment (Dmitra,
2010)

8.  Rais et. Al (2011) – Multiword Malay indexing
using combination of query translation
approach and weighting schemes.
 Dictionary is crucial in Multiword
detection.
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9.  Malay Proverb Dictionary – using structured
query, Supyan et. al. 2004.
 Provides searchable database of Malay
proverbs and idioms
 The application receives a complete or a part
of proverb/idioms,
 using the pattern matching to search the list
of the proverbs/idioms, and the outputs are
all the proverbs/idioms that similar to the
user’s request.
 Contains almost 24,000 entries.
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10.  Brahmaleen (2010) – Pattern matching and
structured query for Hindi proverbs.
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11.  Dmitra (2010) – German-English Idioms
Treatment
 Method - syntactic matching rules
 METIS II
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13.  While not-end-of-sentence
 words-combined = wi wi+1
 Search words-combine in proverb-database
 If found in proverb-database
 Put words-combined in the proverb-list-
output
 i=i+2
 Else
 i++
 Wend

14.  While not-end-of-sentence
 words-combined = wi wi+1 wi+2
 Search words-combined in proverb-database
 If found in proverb-database
 Put words-combined in the proverb-list-output
 i=i+number-of-words-in-proverb-
detected
 Else
 i++
 Wend

15. Available at : http://bit.ly/pbahasa

16.  Challenges in Malay proverbs
 Word with affixes – Example: “Kembang
sayap” = “Mengembangkan sayap” (spread
your wings).
 Another word in between (stopword)
 Example: “berpijak di bumi nyata” or
sometimes “berpijak di bumi yang nyata”
which means “do not day-dreaming”.

17.  The researchers found out that by using
simple pattern matching, it failed to detect
proverbs that have the aforementioned
problems.
 Another challenge is to determine the right
meaning for proverb that has ambiguous
meaning – the same proverbs may have more
than one meaning. However in this
experiment, all meanings are listed for
proverb with ambiguous meaning.

18.  Next thing to do:
 Include stemming, stop-word removal prior
to detection.

19.  Brief testing and observation has been done to
the result of this application. The researchers
concluded that there are more to improve, which
is implementing another approach.
 One of the approaches to be studied is the
syntactic matching rules proposed by Dmitra [4]
for detecting Germany idioms.
 This Malay proverb detector is a prototype to
experiment with the pattern matching approach
on mobile platform.
 Though it is still in experimentation stage, the
researchers hope that it could contribute to the
public by facilitating the new Malay language
learner.

20.  Thank you
 Malay Proverb Detection; Implementation on Mobile Environment.
 khirulnizam@gmail.com
 http://khirulnizam.com

Available at : http://bit.ly/pbahasa