MY-AKKHARA:
A Romanization-based Burmese (Myanmar) Input Method
Chenchen Ding, Masao Utiyama, and Eiichiro Sumita
Advanced Translation Technology Laboratory,
Advanced Speech Translation Research and Development Promotion Center,National Institute of Information and Communications Technology
3-5 Hikaridai, Seika-cho, Soraku-gun, Kyoto, 619-0289, Japan{chenchen.ding, mutiyama, eiichiro.sumita}@nict.go.jp
Abstractခြ ကြ ခြြိ ကြြိ ခြ ကြ ခြြိ ကြြိMY-AKKHARA is a method used to input
Burmese texts encoded in the Unicode
standard, based on commonly accepted Latintranscription. By using this method, arbitrary
Burmese strings can be accurately inputtedwith 26 lowercase Latin letters. Meanwhile,the 26 uppercase Latin letters are designed
as shortcuts of lowercase letter sequences.
The frequency of Burmese characters is
considered in MY-AKKHARA to realize an
efficient keystroke distribution on a QWERTY
keyboard. Given that the Unicode standard
has not been extensively used in digitizationof Burmese, we hope that MY-AKKHARA cancontribute to the widespread use of Unicode
in Myanmar and can provide a platform
for smart input methods for Burmese in thefuture. An implementation of MY-AKKHARA
running in Windows is released at http://www2.nict.go.jp/astrec-att/member/ding/my-akkhara.html

18 shape variants of Zawgyi for Unicode 103C ခမဲ့ မြိ ဲ့ ခမြိ ြို့2 size and position variants
in Zawgyi for Unicode 102F

3 position variants in Zawgyi for Unicode 1037

ဲ့Figure 1: Shape, size, and position variants in Zawgyi
for identical Unicode characters. The characters may
affect each other: for those with gray background, theshape of 103C is determined by the inside combination, size and position of 102F by 103C, and the position of 1037 by 102F.

on character shape, rather than the phonetic values of characters (Fig. 1). Zawgyi separately encodes all possible variants of characters and diacritics, and allows users to select correct variants
manually. Hence, a redundant character set becomes incompatible with the Unicode standard,and extra effort is required for users to utilize
typeface in detail. To provide a better interface
and promote Unicode for Burmese digitization,
we design a Burmese input method referred toas MY-AKKHARA by Romanization based on theUnicode standard. MY-AKKHARA is generally
based on the mnemonics used in Unicode andthe Myanmar Language Committee Transcription
System (Department of the Myanmar Language
Commission, 2014). The efficiency of the key distribution on the QWERTY keyboard layout is also
considered in the design of MY-AKKHARA.
The implementation of MY-AKKHARA runningin Windows has been released. In this paper,
we first review the default layouts of Burmese
provided in Windows (Win) and Macintosh(Mac) and subsequently provide detailed descriptions of MY-AKKHARA. In addition, the keystroke
distribution of different methods is compared.

Introduction

Burmese (Myanmar) script is an abugida system,
wherein basic characters can be modified using diacritics at all directions or can be combined vertically, rather than a simple left-to-right horizontal
writing (Ding et al., 2016). Details of the Burmese
language can be referred to in Okell and Allott(2001), Okell (2010a,b), and Okano (2007).
Although its use is encouraged in the government and universities, the use of Unicode for
Burmese script1 is not currently widespread. Traditional shape-based typefaces such as Zawgyi2
are preferred for daily use. The issue can beregarded as path dependence due to traditional
typewriters, wherein the input is exactly based1
https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/
U1000.pdf
2
https://code.google.com/archive/p/
zawgyi/downloads

157
Proceedings of the 2019 EMNLP and the 9th IJCNLP (System Demonstrations), pages 157–162
Hong Kong, China, November 3 – 7, 2019. c 2019 Association for Computational Linguistics

2strings with the Unicode Burmese characters.4
Lowercase a, o, x, and 26 uppercase Latin letters are assigned as optional shortcuts. Figure 3
shows an example on the technique of inputting
a Burmese string with rare and stacked charactersusing the proposed method.
The instruction of the proposed input method
can be printed by users on an A4 paper (Fig. 4).
The proposed method can be formulated primarily
through a finite-state automaton (Hopcroft et al.,2013), receiving strings comprising 23 lowercase
Latin letters (excluding a, o, and x) and transiting among different states that represent Burmese
characters. The Appendix provides the description of the automaton.
The shortcuts can be grouped in the following
four categories:

Win and Mac Burmese Keyboards

The keyboard layouts used to input Burmese inUnicode have been provided in Win and Mac
operating systems. Figure 2 illustrates the default layouts of the Burmese Unicode keyboard
in these two mainstream operating systems. Bothof the layouts are a simple mapping from characters to keys. Excluding special punctuation
marks and native number digits, 63 Unicode characters are required to represent modern standard
Burmese textual data, from Unicode 1000 to104F.3 Therefore, 26 keys with shift are not sufficient to cover the character set. In both of thelayouts, extra punctuation (or digit), or alternativekeys are necessary in typing.
The Win layout is adjusted from the traditionallayout of a typewriter, by removing redundant
character varieties and re-arranging the characters
inputted using the Shift-key. Considering that
this layout has a large portion of the traditional one
but with a certain difference, many Win users are
not interested in switching to this layout. Hence
non-Unicode fonts are still inputted using the traditional keyboard in practice. Moreover, the Mac
layout is completely redesigned based on Romanization manner, wherein the Burmese characters
are arranged on the basis of their pronunciations
as represented by the letters on a QWERTY keyboard. However, the design is inflexible, without
considering the practical use of Burmese characters. Thus, the positioning of fingers when typing
is tricky. The comparison of the keystroke distribution will be presented in Section 4.

3• three lowercase letters for common combinations: a=qevq, o=qiuq, and x=qngfq;• uppercase letters to save double keystrokes:
E=qee, F=qff, H=qhh, I=qii, J=qjj,
R=qrr, U=quu, V=qvv, W=qww, and Y=qyy;• uppercase letters to save h/g: B=qbh, C=qch,
D=qdh, G=qgh, K=qkh, L=qlg, M=qmg,
P=qph, Q=qg, T=qth, and Z=qzh; and• uppercase letters for other cases: A=qegg,
N=qny, O=qsr, S=quug, and X=qng.
Lowercase letters a, o, and x can considerably save keystrokes. Note that the shortcuts
have a preceding q in the implementation throughwhich disambiguation can be realized. The recommended uppercase letters are Y, H, and Q, which
can resolve almost all ambiguous cases when typing orthographically correct Burmese texts.
Two issues related to normalizing the encodingof the Burmese script in Unicode are addressed:

MY-AKKHARA: Proposed Input Method

The proposed MY-AKKHARA is inspired by theMac layout and deemed highly natural and efficient. Rather than a simple mapping between
the Unicode characters and keys, we also facilitate character alternation processing by using
the inputted Latin letters. Specifically, double
keystrokes of e, f, h, i, j, r, u, v, w, and y,and the h- and g-keys at the middle of a QWERTY
keyboard are used to alternate characters. This design naturally integrates the Romanization into thecharacter alternation processing. The q-key is reserved to disambiguate in obscure cases throughwhich the input method can precisely input any• 102B is a variant of 102C, exclusively used
for narrow characters of 1001, 1002, 1004,1012, 1015, and 101D. This alternation is executed automatically when typing v or a (i.e.,shortcut for ev). However, qv and qvg can exactly input 102C and 102B, respectively.
• 1037 and 103A can appear successively; however, their order is not precisely identified.
103A 1037 will always be normalized in Unicode into the recommended order 1037 103A.

3

4

Within this range, from 1040 to 104B are Burmese digits and punctuation marks; 1022, 1028, 1033, 1034, and1035 are not used for standard Burmese.

It is possible to intentionally input orthographically incorrect Burmese strings; however, orthographically correct
strings can be inputted more naturally than incorrect ones.

158

0E

0D

0B

08
06

1D
10

17
31

Win

23
14

3E
3B

07
16

1B
4E
19

2E
2D0C
1124
21

39
3A

03
01

4C
15

3D
2B

201C25003637

1A
184D
4C

090A

4D
04

32
3C

3F
1E

122F0F
05

1330

271F

2A
294F
3A

4F

02
382B
2C

262C

3F
1E

04

2106
05

3B
1A

11 0C
10 0B

3A
39

13 0E
12 0D

043A39

Mac

3C
1B

32
2D 2F 31 27

03
02

3D
1D

30 26 2E 24 29
2F 25 2D 23 31 2C

3E
1F

18
1708
070F
1436
190100

1615

20
1C

0A
09

2A

36

312C3A

4E

3837Figure 2: Default Burmese layout in Win (left) and Mac (right). Only the final two digits of Unicode are shown
for a compact presentation. The places of f- and j- keys on a QWERTY keyboard are marked by bold frame. For
each key, the lower character is inputted using simple keystroke, whereas the upper character requires pressing theShift-key. On the Mac keyboard, some character combinations are mapped on one key, which is underlined in
the figure. Meanwhile several rare characters require Alt-key, which is in gray color. Note that 103A and 1036
marked with gray background appear two times on the Mac keyboard.
knကgကနgကငfကဏfကဏ်tကဏ္hကဏတgကဏထakကဏ္ဌကဏ္ဌကcကဏ္ဌကကော

e
XFကဏ္ဌကကောစ

vကဏ္ဌကက

TFigure 3: Example of the proposed input method. The top row is the typed Latin letters; the inputted Burmesestring after each keystroke is presented in an increasing manner. Latin letters with frame are the shortcuts andthose with dark background are special design that should be remembered by users. Burmese strings with graybackground have a character alternation from their previous status. Although g and h are regarded as alternation
operators, they are also part of the Romanization, i.e., the first g after n and h after t. The shortcuts mainly savethe extra alternation by g, h and double keystroke (i.e., X, T, and F). Lowercase a is a shortcut for an extremelycommon character combination that can be inputted using ev.

4Keystroke Distribution

preference. When the Shift-key is completely
applied, the frequency is less than two times thatof used in Win keyboard, and it is approximately
equal to the lower bound used in Mac keyboard.
Generally, index fingers are mostly utilized and little fingers have fewer burdens in MY-AKKHARA.

The Burmese language has two different styles:literary and colloquial. For the literary style data,
the publicly accessible Burmese dataset in theAsian Language Treebank (ALT) project (Rizaet al., 2016) is used, containing approximately
20, 000 long sentences from news articles.5 For
the colloquial style data, we use an in-house translated Burmese version of the Basic Travel Expression Corpus (BTEC) (Kikui et al., 2003),
comprising approximately 400, 000 daily expressions. Figures 5 and 6 show the comparison of thekeystroke distribution in Win and Mac keyboards
and by MY-AKKHARA, respectively.
The middle area of the Mac keyboard has notbeen efficiently used. Although the uppercase F
can be used instead of lowercase q, the frequencyof the Shift-key will increase considerably. Thekeystroke is more focused at the middle of the keyboard by MY-AKKHARA than that on the Win andMac keyboards. The use of the Shift-key is optional in MY-AKKHARA, depending on the users’

5Conclusion and Future WorkIn this study, a Romanization-based Burmese input method called MY-AKKHARA is proposed topromote the Unicode standard for Burmese digitization. MY-AKKHARA can also be regarded asa Burmese-specified, lossless coding version ofDing et al. (2018), providing a platform to develop
a further fuzzy and smart Burmese input method.

References
Department of the Myanmar Language Commission.
2014.
Myanmar-English dictionary (Myanmaanggalip abidan), 12 edition. Ministry of Education, the Republic of the Union of Myanmar.
Chenchen Ding, Masao Utiyama, and Eiichiro Sumita.
2018. Simplified Abugidas. In Proc. of ACL, Vol. 2,
pages 491–495.

5

http://www2.nict.go.jp/astrec-att/
member/mutiyama/ALT/my-nova-170405.zip

159

1001

ဂ1002

ဃ

1003

င

1004

အ

1021

ဣ

1023ဤ1024

ဥ

1025

ဦ

1026

ဧ1027

ဩ

1029

ဪ

102A

Independent Vowels

1000

ခ

Consonantsက

srg|Og1009

1004 103A

sr|Oဉ

1031 102C

ငeg

ညnyg|Ng

102D 102F

ေါါx

uug|Ug|S

ဈ
100F

ny|N

103A

ါါaug

ဇ
100E

zh|Z

1039

ါoiig|Ig

z1038

ါfig

ဆ100D

1014

1037

ါ

ff|Fvv|V

စ
100C

ch|C
ဍ
1013

န1036

ါ

j

100A

cdg

n
ါ

jj|J

ng|X

100B

ဌ
1012

ဓ
1019

mg|M

1008

ဋ1011

thg|Tg
ဒ1018

dh|D
မ

103F

gh|Gtg

dm

1007

1010

ထ
1017

ဘ
101E

g|Q

တ
1016

th|T
ဗ
101Dbh|B

ဿ

1006

tb

သsg

kh|K

1015

ဖ101C

ဝsk

ပ
101B

ph|P
လ
1021

ww|W

1005

pl

ါ

102Bv

ါ102Ciါ

102Dii|I

ါ

102E

u

ါ

102F

uu|U

ါ1030

e

ေါ

1031

ee|E

ါ1032

ြါ

103Cw

ါ103D

h

ါ

103E

၌

104C

၍

104D

lgg|Lg

၎

104E

egg|A

၏

104F

Various Signs

Combined Vowel Signs

vg

Various Signs

ါr

Dependent Consonant Signs

အy103B

ဠvv|Vdhg|Dg ngg|Xg

Dependent Vowel Signs

101A

ရ1020

ဏယ
101F

rr|R

ဎ

yy|Y
ဟlg|Lnggg|Xgg rrg|Rg

hh|H

Figure 4: Proposed input method. In each cell, the Unicode, the Burmese character, and the input manner are illustrated from top to bottom. For Burmese characters having
more than one way to input, vertical bar is used to separate different manners.

160

qf

[jWin

f
Shift:13.7%

jMac

M

Shift:22.2%~36.2%

MY-AKKHARA
fjf

j
Shift:25.3%

2% 4% 6% 8% 10%~Figure 5: Keystroke distribution on the ALT literary data. The upper-left and upper-right diagrams are Winand Mac keyboards, respectively. The lower images are MY-AKKHARA, with Shift not used (left) and Shiftcompletely used (right) manners, respectively. The usage frequency of the Shift-key is also presented. Note that103A and 1036 appear twice on the Mac keyboard. The two characters are counted by using q and [ to input inthe diagram, where the frequency of Shift-key is 22.2%. The two character can be also inputted by uppercase Fand M. If they are always inputted using the Shift-key, then the frequency of Shift-key increases to 36.2%.
qf[jWinf
Shift:14.4%

jMacMShift:20.6%~33.3%

MY-AKKHARAfjfj
Shift:22.6%

2% 4% 6% 8% 10%~Figure 6: Keystroke distribution on the BTEC colloquial data. The configuration is the same as that of Fig. 5.

Appendix

Chenchen Ding, Ye Kyaw Thu, Masao Utiyama, andEiichiro Sumita. 2016. Word segmentation for
Burmese (Myanmar). ACM TALLIP, 15(4):22.

Figure 7 shows the overall configuration. Routes
connecting the the initial (qs ) and final (qs ) states
are listed in Figs. 8 – 16, where qn , (n ∈ N) are
Burmese characters.6 Although all qn can be thefinal states, a separate qe is used for clarity, and aq is marked explicitly on all the arcs to qe .

John E. Hopcroft, Rajeev Motwani, and Jeffrey D. Ullman. 2013. Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation, 3 edition. Pearson.
Genichiro Kikui, Eiichiro Sumita, Toshiyuki
Takezawa, and Seiichi Yamamoto. 2003. Creating corpora for speech-to-speech translation. In
Proc. of EUROSPEECH, pages 381–384.

start

Kenji Okano. 2007. Colloquial Burmese (Myanmar)
Grammar. Kokusai Gogakusha. (in Japanese).

Figs. 8 – 16qsqe

John Okell. 2010a. Burmese – An introduction to theSpoken Language, Book 1. Northern Illinois University Press.

Figure 7: Overall configuration of the automaton.

John Okell. 2010b. Burmese – An introduction to theSpoken Language, Book 2. Northern Illinois University Press.

qqs

John Okell and Anna Allott. 2001. Burmese / Myanmar Dictionary of Grammatical Forms. Routledge.

σ1q1

σ2q2

qqe

Figure 8: Simplest case. When σ2 is h, (σ1 , q1 , q2 )can be (k, 00, 01), (g, 02, 03), (c, 05, 06),(z, 07, 08), (p, 15, 16), and (b, 17, 18). When σ2 isg, (σ1 , q1 , q2 ) is (m, 19, 36). When σ2 = σ1 ,(σ1 , q1 , q2 ) can be (y, 3B, 1A), (w, 3D, 1C), and(h, 3E, 1D). All σ1 are natural Romanization. When
σ2 is h, it is also a part of the Romanization.

Hammam Riza, Michael Purwoadi, Teduh Uliniansyah, Aw Ai Ti, Sharifah Mahani Aljunied, Luong Chi Mai, Vu Tat Thang, Nguyen Phuong Thai,Vichet Chea, Rapid Sun, Sethserey Sam, Sopheap
Seng, Khin Mar Soe, Khin Thandar Nwet, Masao
Utiyama, and Chenchen Ding. 2016. Introductionof the Asian language treebank. In Proc. of OCOCOSDA, pages 1–6.

6161

Unicode is referred to by the final two digits for brevity.

qqs

σ1

σ2

q1q2

gqq3qqeqqqs
Figure 9: Two-step alternation. When (σ1 , σ2 ) is(l, g), (q1 , q2 , q3 ) is (1C, 20, 4E). Here, l is a naturalRomanization for 101C and 1020, whereas 104E isa special abbreviated mark with l as onset. When(σ1 , σ2 ) is (r, r), (q1 , q2 , q3 ) is (3C, 1B, 4D),respectively. Here, r is a natural Romanization for
103C and 101B, whereas 104D is a special
abbreviated mark with r as onset.

qn q g q g q g q q q
1246eyq

q

q3

gq5

Figure 13: Most complex alternation.
(q1 , q2 , q3 , q4 , q5 , q6 ) is (14, 04, 0A, 0F, 09, 4C).
Here, n, ng and ny are the natural Romanization for
1014, 1004, and 100A, respectively. Other
alternated characters are rare.

qqgqsvv

q1q2qq3qeσqsσσq1qq2qeq
Figure 14: Doubled and looped alternation. (σ, q1 , q2 )can be (j, 38, 37), and (f, 3A, 39). Here, 1038 and103A are remarkably frequent marks; hence
convenient j- and f-keys are assigned, respectively.

Figure 10: Alternation variant of Fig. 9. (q1 , q2 , q3 ) is
(2C, 21, 2B). Considering that 102C and 1021 arefrequently used, the convenient v-key is assigned
instead the natural Romanization by a.

qqqrqssq1gq2q3gq4qqsqegσ q σ q
12σqqq3q4qqegq

Figure 11: Alternation in Fig. 8 with an extra branch.
(q1 , q2 , q3 , q4 ) is (1E, 3F, 29, 2A). Here, s is anatural Romanization for 101E, whereas 103F,1029, and 102A are extremely obscure.

Figure 15: Combination of Figs. 12 and 14.
(σ, q1 , q2 , q3 , q4 ) can be (i, 2D, 2E, 23, 24), and(u, 2F, 30, 25, 26). Here, i and u are the naturalRomanization for the corresponding characters.

qqsg
σ q h q12qqq3q4qqgqeqsgeq1eq2q3gq4qqeeqq

Figure 12: Alternation by h and g. (σ, q1 , q2 , q3 , q4 )can be (t, 10, 11, 0B, 0C), and (d, 12, 13, 0D, 0E).
Both t and d are the natural Romanization, and h isalso a part of the Romanization.

Figure 16: Alternation in Fig. 14 with an extra branch.
(q1 , q2 , q3 , q4 ) is (31, 32, 27, 4F). Here, e is a naturalRomanization for 1031, 1032 and 1027, whereas
104F is an abbreviated mark derived from 1027.

162