A Chinese Electronic Dictionary and Its Application in NooJ

After four years of research, our project of an electronic dictionary containing about 63,000 entries, is near completion. All the entries consist of atomic linguistic units in simplified Chinese characters, the official language of the People’s Republic of China. The totality of these entries would meet the vocabulary needs of daily life. Certain scientific areas, such as mathematics and physics, have also been chosen for inclusion in the dictionary. On this basis, the grammatical categorization of the inputs has been established to clearly identify the different meanings of the entries. Furthermore, the dictionary has the potential to distinguish 15 grammatical categorizations of the Chinese language. In this way any Chinese text may be successfully analyzed using the NooJ software. The grammatical rules to ensure a more comprehensive analysis will be completed at a later stage. The grammatical structure of any sentence in Chinese can be automatically analyzed, so that the aim of assisting the learner to achieve a more complete understanding of Chinese will be realized. As a final result of the research, an effective module for segmenting the Chinese language word by word on the model of Indo-European languages should be possible, as in a Chinese sentence there is no space between two words as there is in Indo-European languages. This tool will also enable the learner to have an easier and more direct access to the Chinese language and its systems. Certain difficult words and other key words can be identified through the use of NooJ.