Using structural information for identifying similar Chinese characters

Abstract

Chinese characters that are similar in their pronunciations or in their internal structures are useful for computer-assisted language learning and for psycholinguistic studies. Although it is possible for us to employ image-based methods to identify visually similar characters, the resulting computational costs can be very high. We propose methods for identifying visually similar Chinese characters by adopting and extending the basic concepts of a proven Chinese input method--Cangjie. We present the methods, illustrate how they work, and discuss their weakness in this paper.