Hantology-A Linguistic Resource for Chinese Language Processing and Studying

Hantology, a character-based Chinese language resource is created to provide an infrastructure for language processing and research on the writing system. Unlike alphabetic or syllabic writing systems, the ideographic writing system of Chinese poses both a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge is that a totally different resources structure must be created to represent and process speaker’s conventionalization of the language. The rare opportunity is that the structure itself is enriched with conceptual classification and can be utilized for ontology building. We describe the contents and possible applications of Hantology in this paper. The applications of Hantology include: (1) an account for the diachronic development of Chinese lexica (2) character-based language processing, (3) a study of conceptual structure differences in Chinese and English, and (4) comparisons of different ideographic writing systems.