A STUDY OF MULTIPLE ATTRIBUTES AND EQUIVALENT ORDERINGS IN CHINESE CHARACTER SORTING

摘要

Chinese character sorting is different from general object sorting in that the attributes used for Chinese character sorting are usually more than one, referred to as multi-level attribute sorting. At each attribute level, the mapping of characters to attributes can be many-to-one caused by homonyms or the same number of strokes, etc. We can sort Chinese characters one level at a time. Some table-driven methods of multi-level sorting work this way in practical cases. However, it is difficult to discover the relationships between character sorting orders and their attribute features, as well as determine the minimum levels of attributes for fast sorting. In this paper, we formally introduce attribute matrix to describe multi-level sorting. Equivalent ordenngs and two kinds of attribute equivalences are introduced to show that multi-level sorting by an attribute matrix can be projected into one level sorting by an attribute vector. Methods to observe attribute equivalences are presented. Finally, An example of Chinese character sorting is provided to verify our theoretical work.