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<Paper uid="W04-2101">
  <Title>Multiple Indexing in an Electronic Kanji Dictionary</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Unlike languages written in alphabetic, syllabic or similar scripts, languages such as Japanese and Chinese, which are written using a large number of characters: hanzi in Chinese, kanji in Japanese, require two distinct sets of dictionaries. These are: a. the traditional &amp;quot;word&amp;quot; dictionaries, as used in most recorded languages. Such dictionaries are usually ordered in some recognized phonetic sequence, and typically include the pronunciation or reading of the word as well as the usual dictionary components: part-of-speech, explanation.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> etc.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> b. character dictionaries, which typically have an entry for each character, and contain such information as the classification of the character according to shape, usage, components, etc., the pronunciation or reading of the character, variants of the character, the meaning or semantic application of the character, and often a selection of words demonstrating the use of the character in the language's orthography. These dictionaries are usually ordered on some visual characteristic of the characters.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> A typical learner of Japanese needs to have both forms of dictionary, and the process of &amp;quot;looking up&amp;quot; an unknown word often involves initially using the character dictionary to determine the pronunciation of one or more of the characters, then using that pronunciation as an index to a word dictionary, in a process that can be time-consuming and error-prone.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> The advent of electronic dictionaries has had a considerable impact on Japanese dictionary usage: a. it has facilitated the integration or association of character and word dictionaries such that a user can index between them in a relatively straightforward manner. This integration was pioneered by the author in the early 1990s (Breen, 1995), and is now a common feature of almost all hand-held electronic Japanese dictionaries and PC-based dictionary packages; b. it has allowed the direct transfer of words between text documents and dictionary software, thus removing the often-laborious character identification; c. for kanji dictionaries, it has greatly increased the number of character indexing methods that can effectively be used, and has also provided the opportunity for new indexing methods that are not available to traditional paper dictionaries.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> This paper will concentrate on the issues associated with Japanese kanji dictionaries. Many of these also apply to Chinese.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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