Hantology-The Knowledge Structure of Chinese Writing System and Its Application
Date Issued
2005
Date
2005
Author(s)
Chou, Ya-Min
DOI
zh-TW
Abstract
Chinese characters are fundamental linguistic units and important resources for natural language processing, how to represent the knowledge structure of Chinese writing system is a critical research issue. However, until now, there are only few studies on this issue. The purpose of this study is to design a framework that can describe the knowledge structure of Chinese writing system. In order to increase the sharing capability of the framework, Hantology, a formal explicit representation of conceptualization for Chinese writing system, is proposed in this thesis.
Hantology describe the orthographic forms, phonological forms, senses, variants, variation and lexicalization of Chinese writing system. The orthographic form of Chinese writing system is ideographic or word-syllable characters. Usually, each Chinese character is not only a writing unit but also a word or morpheme. The most important feature of Chinese writing system is that the orthographic form and sense are extensions of semantic symbols, so the concepts indicated by semantic symbols become the core of Chinese writing system. In this study, we use 540 radicals of ShuoWen as basic semantic symbols. To make the concepts and relations of semantic symbols can be processed by computer systems, the concepts indicated by each radical are analyzed and mapped into IEEE Suggested Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO). In addition, adopting SUMO allows Hantology to integrate with WordNet and the Academia Sinica Bilingual Ontological WordNet(Sinica BOW).
The senses of each Chinese character also adopt SUMO to represent the concepts and relations among various senses. The lexicons generated by difference senses are constructed to express the morphological context. Since the senses depend on the pronunciations, the relations between pronunciations and senses are described by Hantology. In Chinese writing, there are lots of variants which are different orthographic forms of the same word or morpheme. A linguistic context is proposed to describe the relations of variants. To make knowledge shared easily, we build a model expressed by Web Ontology Language-Description Logic(OWL-DL) and integrate with General Ontology for Linguistic Description (GOLD) to provide the writing, morphological, syntactical knowledge for natural language processing.
Finally, the applications of Hantology on the problems of Chinese missing characters and variants retrieval are given. We propose an interchange framework and Missing Characters Description Language(MCDL) for describing missing characters. The digitalized Sutra constructed by CBETA and the Chinese Ancient Corpus of Academia Sinica are used as experimental data. The results show the missing characters and variants retrieval problems can be solved successfully by Hantology and interchange framework proposed in this thesis.
This thesis makes following contributions:
(1) We propose a linguistic ontology to describe the knowledge structure of Chinese writing system. Hantology is the first linguistic ontology of ideographic writing systems. We propose a completely different approach to represent knowledge structure of Chinese writing system. This approach significantly increases the knowledge of Chinese writing system owned by computer systems and is able to assist natural language processing.
(2) We propose a linguistic context for describing the relations of variants.Variants are an important characteristic of Chinese writing. Unfortunately, the relations of variants have not been properly represented in computer systems for a long time. We proposed a linguistic context for describing the relations of variants. The results show this linguistic context has significant improvement than other previous studies on describing the relations of variants.
(3) We propose a framework to describe the variation of language. Language change is always with us. Any linguistic ontology should not ignore the variation of language. Hantology is the first linguistic ontology describing the variation of languages. The aspects of variation described by Hantology include orthographic form, pronunciation, sense, lexicalization and variants relation. This approach can systematically illustrate the development of Chinese writing system.
(4) The missing characters and variants retrieval problems are solved. It is a basic requirement to properly represent characters and symbols for any information processing. However, the Chinese computer systems fail to meet this requirement for decades, so that we always have to face the missing characters and variants retrieval problem. We change the representation of Hanzi to increase the knowledge owned by computers. By integrating missing characters with Hantology, the missing characters and variants problem are solved successfully.
Subjects
語言知識本體
知識工程
Linguistic Ontology
Knowledge Engineering
Writing Systems
Type
thesis
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