Information Retrieval for Malay Text: A Decade Review of Research (2008–2019)

In this paper, we survey and classify most of the information retrieval (IR) approaches to Malay text in order to assess their benefits and limitations. We also summarized the information retrieval tools and related methods, in which ontology is a widely used tool for all countries’ researchers. This research selects Malay language as the primary test collection because there are more issues in Malay languages, particularly those related to deep semantics, including the use of ontology. The traditional Malay retrieval system mostly focused on syntax extraction and keywords only. Mostly this technique will ignore the semantic element and the real meaning of query text and corpus which not fulfil the requirement of the user. Most of the previous study in information retrieval was using English and Arabic language as a test collection. Therefore, advance research is needed and it will be experimented in the future work. The finding of the paper will help other researchers discover the information and research gap regarding the Malay text.