Visually and Phonologically Similar Characters in Incorrect Simplified Chinese Words

摘要

Visually and phonologically similar cha- racters are major contributing factors for errors in Chinese text.By defining ap- propriate similarity measures that consid- er extended Cangjie codes,we can identi- fy visually similar characters within a fraction of a second.Relying on the pro- nunciation information noted for individ- ual characters in Chinese lexicons,we can compute a list of characters that are phonologically similar to a given charac- ter.We collected 621 incorrect Chinese words reported on the Internet,and ana- lyzed the causes of these errors.83%of these errors were related to phonological similarity,and 48%of them were related to visual similarity between the involved characters.Generating the lists of phono- logically and visually similar characters, our programs were able to contain more than 90%of the incorrect characters in the reported errors.