Hanzi Grid Toward a Knowledge Infrastructure for Chinese Character-based Cultures
Ya-Min Chou, Shu‐Kai Hsieh, Chu‐Ren Huang · 2008
Abstract. The long-term historical development and broad geographi-cal variation of Chinese character (Hanzi/Kanji) has made it a cross-cultural information sharing platform in East Asia. However, due to the lack of proper research framework, the integration of heterogeneous knowledge grounded in Hanzi and its variants has been a thorny problem. In this paper, we propose a theoretical framework for the knowledge rep-resentation of Hanzi in the cross-cultural context. Our proposal is mainly based on two resources: Hantology and Generative Lexicon Theory. Han-tology is a comprehensive Chinese character-based knowledge resource created to provide a solid foundation both for philological surveys and language processing tasks, while Generative lexicon theory is extended to catch the abundant knowledge information of Chinese characters within its proposed qualia structure. We believe that the proposed theoretical framework will have great influence on the current research paradigm of Hanzi studies, and help to shape an emergent model of intercultural collaboration.