Web-Based Igbo Thesaurus with Real-Time Retrieval

Abstract

Igbo Thesaurus is an online Igbo dictionary. It is the lexicon of Igbo words and their meaning made accessible over the Information Technology platform. Igbo's words transit palpable boundaries of culture as it drives culture in its wake, as was liberated from print material. This web-based Igbo thesaurus is a pure Igbo dictionary that gives word synonyms and meaning in the Igbo language, unlike the English-Igbo dictionary seen everywhere online. The challenge is that the existing Igbo dictionary only translates the words from Igbo to English language and vice versa. Hence, we cannot call such a platform an Igbo dictionary since it is a preconception, which looks exactly like an English dictionary. Imagine you heard an Igbo word that is new to you, and there is no other source of getting the meaning other than an online Igbo dictionary. Previous online Igbo dictionaries have not solved the problem at hand.  This new online Igbo dictionary developed is called Igbo Thesaurus. It solved the bottlenecks of the existing online dictionaries stated herein. The character set and collation that suits the Igbo diacritics to enable emphasis to be placed on some part of the word meaning like explaining the word using a proverb was also implemented and integrated into this web-based Igbo Thesaurus. The text-formatted algorithm was adopted and implemented in both front-end and back-end development. The online Igbo Thesaurus (dictionary) was achieved using internet technologies such as PHP, JavaScript, and MariaDB. A real-time search was adopted using Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX).