Towards a Language Information Centre for Malay

Malay is not only the national language of Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei but it is also spoken in Singapore, southern Thailand and southern Philippines. It is indeed a major official language of the ASEAN community. However, despite the language being widely spoken and written, much is still to be done in the way of linguistic research and more so in the development of language processing systems and tools. In fact, very little of the literature and reference material in Malay is available in raw electronic form to support research and development work, let alone in forms that are readily accessible and manipulable on the information highway.