Applying Chinese Word Sketch Engine to Distinguish Commonly Confused Words

Abstract

Recently, as the popularizing of Chinese language learning on a worldwide scale and the rapid expansion of Confucius Institutes, teaching Chinese as an international language (TCIL) develops rapidly all over the world. As a result, teaching commonly confused words from the perspective of non-native Chinese learners has become a necessary concern. Traditional commonly confused words discrimination stands much more on authoritative Chinese dictionaries for senses definition or meanings of a word. However, some scholars in and out of China now promote a new technology for collocation extraction in Chinese which is based on corpora. The latest concept of commonly confused words discrimination is using Chinese Word Sketch (CWS), a powerful tool for extracting meaning grammatical relations and presenting non-native Chinese learners an in-depth analysis of synonyms phrase. This method can not only embrace learners’ better understanding about the discrimination between synonym words or commonly confused words, but also built up their capability of choosing a suitable word in different Chinese contexts. This study takes a pair of commonly confused words 接收 jiēshōu ‘receive’ and 接受 jiēshou ‘accept’ which non-native Chinese learners would always confuse as an example, and based on Chinese Gigaword Corpus, as well as using CWS, to explore the discrimination between 接收 jiēshōu ‘receive’ and 接受 jiēshou ‘accept’, showing how to adopt CWS to distinguish commonly confused words and apply the results in error analysis and vocabulary learning.