Electronic Dictionary Manipuri to English and its Impact in the Development of Manipuri Language

Abstract

A word is basically an association of linguistic sound and meaning. The spelling does newlinenot always easily correlate with the sound of a word. Dictionaries help us both with the newlinespelling and pronunciation of such words. This type of dictionary is known as general type newlinedictionary. In the early 1990s computer technology made possible the release of dictionaries newlineelectronically i.e. on floppy disks or CD-ROM. By the end of the 1990s many dictionaries newlinewere available in various print and electronic editions. In many circumstances reading an newlineelectronic dictionary is far superior to reading a traditional paper dictionary book. This work newlinedescribes the development of Manipuri-English electronic dictionary, its impact in Manipuri newlinelanguage and some related works, which incorporates many useful features for a wide variety newlineof applications. One of the features is - it supports meaning for euphonic and assimilate newlinewords (which are not available in the original printed dictionary). It can also show meaning newlinefor phonetically similar words in the dictionary, if the users misspelled the original word. For newlinethis purpose, a phonetic conversion of words is done in the original dictionary word file. It newlinecan also search for the word, using the wild card facility and we can search words regarding newlinethe part of speech (lexical items), This Electronic Dictionary can be a helpful tool to the newlinelanguage researchers as it is capable of providing much statistical information about newlineManipuri words. newlineIn this thesis, chapter 2 describes the review of literature and types of dictionary and newlinealso about Manipuri language. The next chapter i.e. Chapter 3 deals in development of a newlineManipuri stemmer. Stemming is the process of removing the affixes from inflected words, newlinewithout doing complete morphological analysis. A stemming Algorithm is a procedure to newlinereduce all words with the same stem to a common form. It is useful in many areas of newlinecomputational linguistics and information-retrieval work. This technique is used by the newlinevarious search engines to find the best solution for a problem. The algorithm is a basic newlinebuilding block for the stemmer. Stemmer is basically used in information retrieval system to newlineimprove the performance .The work presents a stemmer for Manipuri, which is based on newlinePorter s algorithm. newlineIn the next one i.e. Chapter 4 the work dwells on Analysis of search Techniques in newlineelectronic dictionary and spelling variations in Manipuri writing system. Here we have newlineanalyzed four different spelling variations as: (a) Replacement of Characters (b) Deletion of newlineCharacter (c) Addition of character (d) Transposition of character newlineChapter 5 analyses result and discussion of Manipuri-English Electronic Dictionary- which newlineis the main work of this thesis - how This Dictionary is developed and here different types of newlineword searching i.e. general search, wild card search, lexical search are discussed . Sources of newlinedata for our dictionary are taken from Daily Newspapers, Weekly or monthly journals and newlineManipuri lexicons (paper dictionaries) newlineWe have used Binary Search for our Dictionary word search. Binary search is one of newlinethe most popular dictionary searching techniques widely used by many popular electronic newlinebilingual dictionary. It is one of the fastest and time saving dictionary searching algorithm newlinewhich is also known as greedy method, some call it divide and conquer method as well. newlineThe wild card search and search by grammatical items is also supported in the dictionary. newlineWe have also analyzed the impact of the Manipuri-English Electronic dictionary so developed, through a hard copy questionnaire collected from schools, colleges, technical institutes and University of Manipur and online questionnaire through social sites like facebook using our online website database. newlineThe last Chapter 6 gives the Conclusion and Future Scope of the work. newline