RELAXATION-BASED WORD IDENTIFICATION FOR REMOVING THE AMBIGUITY IN PHONETIC CHINESE INPUT

Abstract

The fact that there exists a large number of homonyms in Chinese characters is a problem for the phonetic input method which is favored by most casual users for Chinese input into computers. A new approach to solving the problem is proposed. The input method is regarded as a process of assigning syllables to words. The proposed approach makes use of the fact that little or even no ambiguity exists in determining the characters in a multi-syllabic word. The formation relationships among the words in an input sentence are utilized to perform a relaxation-based word identification process. An advantage of the approach is that once the composing words of the sentence are identified, the desired characters are also correctly selected. Experiments have been conducted with a hit rate of over 96%, thus showing the feasibility of this approach.