Title: A semantic analysis of Chinese radicals

Authors: He Hu, Xiaoyong Du

Addresses: Key Laboratory of Data Engineering and Knowledge Engineering, Renmin University of China, MOE, Beijing 100872, P.R. China; School of Information, Renmin University of China, Beijing 100872, P.R. China. ' Key Laboratory of Data Engineering and Knowledge Engineering, Renmin University of China, MOE, Beijing 100872, P.R. China; School of Information, Renmin University of China, Beijing 100872, P.R. China

Abstract: One of the most significant features of the Chinese language is that it displays a considerable amount of semantic information at the radical (components comprising Chinese characters) level. Chinese radicals show the important semantic impacts on Chinese characters. However, many previous studies have mainly focused on the word and phrase level of Chinese semantic analysis. In this paper, we quantitatively analyse Chinese radicals| semantics by mapping radicals and the corresponding characters| semantics to the WordNet synsets| hierarchy. Through the analysis, we find out the semantic strength of Chinese radicals and discover the entropy of the Chinese radicals set.

Keywords: Chinese characters; Chinese radicals; radical semantics; Chinese language; China.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBIDM.2008.022738

International Journal of Business Intelligence and Data Mining, 2008 Vol.3 No.4, pp.426 - 436

Published online: 25 Jan 2009 *

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