A Preliminary Study on the Semantic Strength of Chinese Radicals

Abstract

Unlike most other natural languages, Chinese language displays a considerable amount of semantic information at the character level; the case is especially true when looking at the components (radicals) comprising Chinese characters. Radicals (bushou) show important semantic impacts on Chinese characters. Most published papers have focused on word and phrase level of Chinese semantic analysis. In this paper, we study the semantics strength of Chinese radicals by comparing the radicals' semantics with the meaning of the character. We investigate on the spatial patterns of radicals and map radicals and characters' semantics to WordNet synsets hierarchy; we compare their semantics relationships and discover the semantics strength of Chinese radicals.