A Design of Thai-English Transliterated Word Retrieval for Smart Phones

Most people in Thailand have a mobile phone for communication. New mobiles phones are smarter and cheaper. They have more features and support multiple language included Thai for entry and display. However entry the Thai text is difficult due to the keyboard layout and the number of letters. There are smart methods for entry complex language, such as Chinese's Pinyin and Japanese's Romaji. These methods are spelling the native characters in form of Latin script by using the normal English characters. The entry data are in the form of English transliteration words that will be converted back to the native language by using the word prediction system. This method helps user to entry the words easier with accuracy. This paper proposes a design of the Thai entry system that is working the same as the Pinyin and the Romaji systems. The main trouble is the complication of Thai-English transliteration system. There is a standard version of Thai-English transliteration by the Royal Institute but it has limitations. So the others nonstandard method are considered. The design of the Thai entry system is validated through an experiment. The results show that the proposed designed system performs better than the conventional input method. Keywords—smart phone, Thai, transcription, transliteration, word retrieval.