CharDB: A Comprehensive Database and Search Engine of Chinese Characters
@Jinbiao Yang
The number of Chinese characters is more than twenty thousand. Each character has its pronunciation, written form, meaning, and other attributes. Should we need to investigate the characters, a lot of databases are available. But there were two major diffi culties to make use of the databases. The fi rstis the information integrality, each database contained only partial information of partial Chinese characters; the second is the user interface, most of the databas- es provided only the search entry to the written characters or the pinyins, but not to the rest of the attributes. In order to facilitate the studies of Chi- nese characters, we provide a database, CharDB (https://chardb.cls.ru.nl/), which contains massive information (spoken forms, written forms, frequencies, variants, encodings, etc.) from various sources [5, 4, 1, 2] for 20,902 characters in the fi rst version of CJK Unifi ed Ideographs([3], U+4E00 ～U+9FA5), and a search engine that can fi lter all the attributes in the database and fl exibly combine the fi ltering conditions. In case researchers need to store or analyze the fi ltered result, CharDB will export an offl ine sheet. Besides, we providea Chinese word database which covers word frequencies[4] and is also linked with the character database. So researchers can fi nd the words fi tted their needs,or get the word attributes of their provided word list.
References
[1] CRAN - package tmcn. https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/ tmcn/index.html. Accessed: 2019-2-26.
[2] UAX #38: Unicode han database (unihan). http://www.unicode.org/ reports/tr38/tr38-21.html. Accessed: 2019-2-26.
[3] Unihan database. https://unicode.org/charts/unihangridindex.html. Accessed: 2019-2-26.
[4] Qing Cai and Marc Brysbaert. SUBTLEX-CH: Chinese word and character frequencies based on fi lm subtitles. PLoS One, 5(6), 2010.
[5] Tomohiko Morioka. CHISE: Character processing based on character on- tology. In Large-Scale Knowledge Resources. Construction and Application, pages 148–162. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2008.