Khmer Word Search: Challenges, Solutions, and Semantic-Aware Search

Search is one of the key functionalities in digital platforms and applications such as an electronic dictionary, a search engine, and an e-commerce platform. While the search function in some languages is trivial, Khmer word search is challenging given its complex writing system. Multiple orders of characters and different spelling realizations of words impose a constraint on Khmer word search functionality. Additionally, spelling mistakes are common since robust spellcheckers are not commonly available across the input device platforms. These challenges hinder the use of Khmer language in search-embedded applications. Moreover, due to the absence of WordNet-like lexical databases for Khmer language, it is impossible to establish semantic relation between words, enabling semantic search. In this paper, we propose a set of robust solutions to the above challenges associated with Khmer word search. The proposed solutions include character order normalization, grapheme and phoneme-based spellcheckers, and Khmer word semantic model. The semantic model is based on the word embedding model that is trained on a 30-million-word corpus and is used to capture the semantic similarities between words.