

Article 11984 of soc.culture.china:
Path: sol.ctr.columbia.edu!samsung!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!udel!rochester!rit!ultb!jxy7070
>From: [email-masked] (J.X. Yih)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.china
Subject: Chinese in Computer
Message-ID: <[email-masked]>
Date: 16 Mar 90 08:44:40 GMT
References: <[email-masked]>
Reply-To: [email-masked] (J.X. Yih )
Organization: Information Systems and Computing @ RIT, Rochester, New York
Lines: 76

This is a long stuff.  If you are NOT interested in Chinese-Computer,
press "n" now!!

In article <[email-masked]> rick@hanauma (Richard Ottolini) writes:
>
>Sony Company announced a notebook sized computer last week for Japanese
>Kanji word processing without a keyboard.  The user draws up to 3500
>characters on the screen to input information.
>
>Perhaps this can be adpated for Chinese use.  It solves the problem of
>having to learn pinyin, Big5 etc.

As far as I know, just like English, Japanese is a symbol-directed
language.  That means all words can be devided into the basic symbol.

I can not find any method to devide Chinese into some certain symbols.

I think that the basic steps of Sony system are as follows:
	1. user writes words on the screen
	2. computer recognizes the words symbol-by-symbol by
	   using some Artificial Intellgence program
	3. combining the symbols into the word
	4. do something (save or other action)

There are lots problem in Chinese:
	Chinese is much more complex than Japanese.  ==>
	It will much harder to recognize (especilly in hand-writing!).

Yes, we can treat every Chinese word as a symbol.  Then can you image
that how many patterns the poor computer has to remember?  Always
aware the limitation of computers!

On the Sony System, all stuff that computer has to remember is the X 
letters (for X<100).
(sorry, I don't know how many symbols Japanese has)  If it has no
spell-checking, it just combines these symbols into a word.  That's
not very difficult in computer.  In fact, I think that Sony System
has certainly included the spell-checking.  Sony is proud of his
technique (pattern-recognization is not an easy tech.) and having
their language in the computers.

Now, back to our topic.  Because Chinese is NOT a symbolic language,
if you have some concepts about computer, you can think about lots
of difficulies.

Why do we use Pinyin or Big5?  Because that's a method to represent
Chinese in a symbolic way.  The basic difficulties of Pinyin are:
	1. No standard
	2. One has try to "quess" (because of the same pronunciation)
	     ex:   "yi(3)" may be "chair"
				  "already"
				  "ant"   ..................

But if I write in this way:
	"yi(3) jin(1)"		  (already)
everyone can understand.  Why?  Why can you understand it?  The reason
is that I said a whole "phrase".

BTW, I got an idea:
	1. standarlize the Pinyin method
	2. build a translator based on a "Pinyin-Phrase Base"
Then we can set up a Chinese system like Sony did on Japanese.

I think that the standard of Pinyin is not very hard.  The key point is:
how should we build the "Pinyin-Phrase Base"?  You know, lots lots lots
of phrases in Chinese....

All the above is my personal opinion.
If you have any suggestion or idea, contact with me by e-mail

[email-masked]

a Chinese-lover