The orthographical complexity of Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) poses a special challenge to the developers of computational linguistic tools, especially in the area of intelligent information retrieval. These difficulties are exacerbated by the lack of a standardized orthography in these languages, especially the highly irregular Japanese orthography. This paper focuses on the typology of CJK orthographic variation, provides a brief analysis of the linguistic issues, and discusses why lexical databases should play a central role in the disambiguation process.
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