The Effectiveness of a Jawi Stemmer for Retrieving Relevant Malay Documents in Jawi Characters

The Malay language has two types of writing script, known as Rumi and Jawi. Most previous stemmer results have reported on Malay Rumi characters and only a few have tested Jawi characters. In this article, a new Jawi stemmer has been proposed and tested for document retrieval. A total of 36 queries and datasets from the transliterated Jawi Quran were used. The experiment shows that the mean average precision for a “stemmed Jawi” document is 8.43%. At the same time, the mean average precision for a “nonstemmed Jawi” document is 5.14%. The result from a paired sample t-test showed that the use of a “stemmed Jawi” document increased the precision in document retrieval. Further experiments were performed to examine the precision of the relevant documents that were retrieved at various cutoff points for all 36 queries. The results for the “stemmed Jawi” document showed a significantly different start, at a cutoff of 40, compared with the “nonstemmed Jawi” documents. This result shows the usefulness of a Jawi stemmer for retrieving relevant documents in the Jawi script.