New Techniques in Thai-English Transliterated Words Searching, Applied to Our New Webservices Platform for Tourism (WICHAI)

This research proposes a new technique in Thai-English transliterated words searching by using the similar-sounding words database with similarity and relatedness calculations. The proposed search engine is used at the core of the “WICHAI” platform for tourism. The newly proposed method can help tourists, who do not speak the Thai language, to find relevant and accurate keywords on the Internet with better flexibility. The calculations use, successively, consonants and vowels comparisons based on the Royal Thai General System of Transcription (RTGS) and iterations with similar characters. Similarity calculations using 4 algorithms with a threshold of 0.6 were computed in order to obtain the most appropriate words while maintaining the level of word-meaning understanding