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Visually and Phonologically Similar Characters in Incorrect Chinese Words: Analyses, Identification, and Applications

Authors:

C.-Y. LeeAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Transactions on Asian Language Information Processing (TALIP), Volume 10, Issue 2

Article No.: 10, Pages 1 - 39

https://doi.org/10.1145/1967293.1967297

Published: 01 June 2011 Publication History

Abstract

Information about students’ mistakes opens a window to an understanding of their learning processes, and helps us design effective course work to help students avoid replication of the same errors. Learning from mistakes is important not just in human learning activities; it is also a crucial ingredient in techniques for the developments of student models. In this article, we report findings of our study on 4,100 erroneous Chinese words. Seventy-six percent of these errors were related to the phonological similarity between the correct and the incorrect characters, 46% were due to visual similarity, and 29% involved both factors. We propose a computing algorithm that aims at replication of incorrect Chinese words. The algorithm extends the principles of decomposing Chinese characters with the Cangjie codes to judge the visual similarity between Chinese characters. The algorithm also employs empirical rules to determine the degree of similarity between Chinese phonemes. To show its effectiveness, we ran the algorithm to select and rank a list of about 100 candidate characters, from more than 5,100 characters, for the incorrectly written character in each of the 4,100 errors. We inspected whether the incorrect character was indeed included in the candidate list and analyzed whether the incorrect character was ranked at the top of the candidate list. Experimental results show that our algorithm captured 97% of incorrect characters for the 4,100 errors, when the average length of the candidate lists was 104. Further analyses showed that the incorrect characters ranked among the top 10 candidates in 89% of the phonologically similar errors and in 80% of the visually similar errors.

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Index Terms

Visually and Phonologically Similar Characters in Incorrect Chinese Words: Analyses, Identification, and Applications

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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Asian Language Information Processing

ACM Transactions on Asian Language Information Processing Volume 10, Issue 2

June 2011

111 pages

ISSN:1530-0226

EISSN:1558-3430

DOI:10.1145/1967293

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Copyright © 2011 ACM.

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Publication History

Published: 01 June 2011

Accepted: 01 January 2011

Revised: 01 December 2010

Received: 01 September 2010

Published in TALIP Volume 10, Issue 2

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