Chinese Characters Mapping Table of Japanese, Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese

Abstract

Chinese characters are used both in Japanese and Chinese, which are called Kanji and Hanzi respectively. Chinese characters contain significant semantic information, a mapping table between Kanji and Hanzi can be very useful for many Japanese-Chinese bilingual applications, such as machine translation and cross-lingual information retrieval. Because Kanji characters are originated from ancient China, most Kanji have corresponding Chinese characters in Hanzi. However, the relation between Kanji and Hanzi is quite complicated. In this paper, we propose a method of making a Chinese characters mapping table of Japanese, Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese automatically by means of freely available resources. We define seven categories for Kanji based on the relation between Kanji and Hanzi, and classify mappings of Chinese characters into these categories. We use a resource from Wiktionary to show the completeness of the mapping table we made. Statistical comparison shows that our proposed method makes a more complete mapping table than the current version of Wiktionary.

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