Text Processing of Thai Language “The Three Seals Law”

TEXT PROCESSING OF THAI LANGUAGE =THE THREE SEALS LAW= Shigeharu Sugita National Museum of Ethnology Expo Park, Senri, Suita OSAKA 565, Japan Abstract Computer softwares for processing Thai language are developed at National Museum of Ethnology,Osaka,Japan. We use a popular intelligent terminal TEKTRONIX 4051 for inputting and editing,IBM 370 model 138 for KWIC making and sorting, and CANON's laser beam printer for final output. Using these systems,"Kotmai Tra Sam Duang"(the Three Seals Law)which con- tains many kind of laws and ordinances proclaimed in Thai between 1350-1805 A.D. is computerized. This text has 1700 pages and about 1400000 letters. KWIC index becomes 200000 lines. Some statistical data for this text are obtained. They are occurrence fre- quency data of single letter,group vowel, and letter combination(digram),etc. Aknowledgements This report is a result of joint project at National Museum of Ethnology. The member are Y.Ishii, I.Akagi, S.Tanabe Y.Sakamoto, S.Uemura, A.Ishizawa, M.Sawamura, K.Sasaki, Y.Kurita, and S.Sugita. Their research field are eth- nology,linguistics,computer science,and sociology etc. We thanks Mr. Sophon Chitthasatcha, Miss Sumalee Maungpaisaln and Miss Hiroe Matsumoto for their help in Segmentation, inputting and correction. We also thanks Prof. K.Nakayama and A.Oikawa of Tsukuba University for their support on making Thai letter patterns and output software for laser beam printer. Introduction In the field of ethnology or cul- tural anthlopology,ethnographies are very important information sources for comparative study of many different societies. Not only bibliographic data but also contents of text are necessary. HRAF(Human Relations Area Files), which was developed by Dr. Murdock and now managed by HRAF Inc. at Yale Univer- sity,is a unique retrieval system. They use about 800 category codes by which analysts classify the contents of each pages of books. Though HRAF system is an elaborate work,it is not easy to search necessary data by user terms,that is,natural words. If whole text are fed into computer,it is very easy to retrieve any part of text by the same natural words used in the text. On-line retrieval system is smart and effective. But sometimes researcher wants printted index like as KWIC which is usable at any time and place. Com- bining KWIC index and thesaurus diction- ary,it gives us a very powerful tools for searching special expression hidden in the text. Till quite recentry,at least in Japan,most cases of computer processing of natural language are distored to indo-europian language or Japanese. In the ethnological studies,we must treat many areas in the world. We need comput- er softwares which process unfamiliar languages for us,such as Arabic,Korean, Sumerian,Mongolian,Devanagari,Thai,etc. National Museum of Ethnology at Osaka has introduced several computer systems to encourage humanity study,and now is developing many application softwares which are usable by any re- searchers who do not know computer pro- gramming or how to use computer. This report describes one of such application softwares which treats Thai letters. The points of our work are as follows; i) A popular computer terminal is used for Thai letter inputting and editing. It is easy to use because dead key oper- ation is not …

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