Multilingual conceptual access to lexicon based on shared orthography

Abstract

In this paper we propose a model for conceptual access to multilingual lexicon based on shared orthography. Our proposal relies crucially on two facts: That both Chinese and Japanese conventionally use Chinese orthography in their respective writing systems, and that the Chinese orthography is anchored on a system of radical parts which encodes basic concepts. Each orthographic unit, called hanzi and kanji respectively, contains a radical which indicates the broad semantic class of the meaning of that unit. Our study utilizes the homomorphism between the Chinese hanzi and Japanese kanji systems to ide 1 ntify bilingual word correspondences. We use bilingual dictionaries, including WordNet, to verify semantic relation between the crosslingual pairs. These bilingual pairs are then mapped to an ontology constructed based on relations to the relation between the meaning of each character and the