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<Paper uid="C90-3070">
  <Title>A SELF-LEARNING SYSTEM FOR THE CHINESE CHARACTERS</Title>
  <Section position="1" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
A SELF-LEARNING SYSTEM
FOR THE CHINESE CHARACTERS
Georges FAFIOT\[E
GETA, IMAG (UJF &amp; CNRS)
</SectionTitle>
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  </Section>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
Abstract
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> We me prototyping a system tor the self-learning of Chinese characters, presently on a Macintosh computer.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> The interactive inlormation base provides the learner with basic universal properties of the characters (morphology, intrinsic meaning), extended wilh a quite comprehensive set of language-dependent aspects (phonetics, extended semantics, contextual or pragmatic attributes). The user is intended to have a professional or cultural non-academic motivation. The system allows to experiment on Heisig's proposal involving the separation of Chinese characters learning (or Japanese kanji) from that of the language. A prototype under HyperC~rd may be demonstrated on a subset of about 200 characters.</Paragraph>
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  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
Keywords
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    <Paragraph position="0"> Chinese characters, Kanji, interactive information base, computer aided learning, personalized autonomous acquisition of Chinese characters.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
  <Section position="4" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
1. Project motivation
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The aim of the project is twofold: the first part is to model an :interactive information base on characteristic properties of Chinese characters (or Japanese kanji), which would lend itself to personalized self-instruction in a tree exploration or encyclopedic mode; and the second is to build the base on which we may subsequently explore an Intelligent Tutoring System architecture, which would take into account the expertise already gained by the learner over prior sessions. The work presented in the paper concerns the first aim.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> The system is intended to provide a public of educated users with an adaptive environment for the autonomous learning and review of the properties of ideogrmns, such as their etymology, structure, graphic form, phonetics, semantics, composition (semantic and phonetic) within other characters... \[CIYUAN 1984, NELSON A.N. 1974\].</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Our system is not for the study of the Chinese language or even of Chinese words (which are usually composed of more than one character), but solely for that of the characters as basic morphological units, even though instantiated with phonetic and semantic values in Chinese.We had initially intended to follow Heisig's view \[HEISIG 1977\], which separates the acquisition of the universal qualities of characters (basically morphology and intrinsic meaning), from the learning of language-dependent aspects (such as the pronunciation, semantics, pragmatics in their use, etc). But for developing other applications, it seemed advisable to also include in our base a comprehensive knowledge of language.-specific attributes, as it is first on Chinese language.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> The normal target user is not a scholar. He (or she) is an active adult, who is not assumed to have the available time nor the tbcusext motivation to undertake an intensive academic program (he is a scientist or a technical or industrial executive). Rather, he wishes to study the characters in a self-paced, extracurricular fashion, or to develop a multifaceted view of them according to his interests. The user wants to grasp and to memorize characters' important properties, to initiate his own &amp;quot;learning information base&amp;quot; on them, so, for example, not to feel illiterate during working visits in China or Japan. Later he might gradually enlarge and interrelate his personal knowledge items.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> The learner will be given access, via an encyclopedic mode which provides a highly interactive user interface, to either basic properties or to extra specific information on the characters. He will be able to do so starting either from a key property he knows about a character, or from a partial (and even partially erroneous) description of it.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> He will be also encouraged to record his personal discoveries or conclusions as additional materials: his personal mnemonics, his own mental images or selfbuilt references on semantic links between characters, between their graphic form and meaning, etc. It has been shown that such an active and creative approach is very suitable to Western learners for autonomous acquisition and development of cognitive skills during file study of Japanese kanji \[HEISIG 1977\].</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> 2. Overall view of the system Central objects in the information base of the present project are: the current standard information base on characters (which merges basic and special material on their properties, textual, ideographic, and sound data), the learner's current personal information base (with his addition~fl notes), and the learner's current profile (data he already accessed, drawn from a session journal or a global curriculum report).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="8"> The main functional handlers in the system are as follows: a learner and a developer interface, a query analyzer and character selector, a session monitor, a session observer, and a session and profile editor.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="9"> The identification and the selection of the working character (not a pattern recognition of a character drawn by hand) will interpret the learner's query, with respect to a subset of classical descriptive properties such as: the meanings, pinyin codes or stroke numbers of the character and/or of its semantic or phonetic radical if it has one. An expert assistant module will be added to enhance the interactive character selection, while managing missing or erroneous items in the query.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="10"> 3. The information thesaurus of Chinese characters Activities proposed in the system allow the study of a comprehensive set of properties of a character. In the information base there are actually two levels of accessibility: basic essential information, and additional more detailed (or erudite) material \[WIEGER 1972, RYJIK 1980\]. They are all listed here, in the context of the Chinese language.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="11"> Morphology: the etymology of the character, its iconographic origin and evolution, its generic category (among 6 classical ones), the calligraphy (the stroke order, the different writing styles, their evolution) \[ZHONGGUO SHUFA DA ZIDIAN 1983\], the structure (synthetic representation of the morphological tree of the character, semantic and/or phonetic radicals within it), the use in derivation or composition within other characters.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="12"> Phonetics:  - the pinyin encoding, the tone, - the standard pronunciation (from a digitized sound base), - ultimately, different provincial or colloquial pronunciations.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="13"> Semantics: - the usual meaning, mnemonics proposed to the learner, learner's personal mnemonics~ common &amp;quot;false friends&amp;quot; (misleading similarities), other characters in homomorphy, homonymy, usually confusing homophones, synonyms, antonyms.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="14"> 4. Current prototyping  We first modelled the pertinent material on characters, and specified an interaction scheme for the user, then the learner interface.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="15"> We refer to an iterative cycle for the software development. We have prototyped first a simplified version of the system on a very small subset of the character base, in order to validate the data structure, the design of the main functionals and the user interface. We have chosen object-oriented programming tools as well-suited to the incremental realization scheme. Thus far, this first version is being developed on Apple Macintosh under the HyperTalk-HyperCard environments, regarded as fair facilities for implementing hypertextual and voiced applications. A second level of prototyping is expected on a Xerox AI workstation using LOOPS and Common Lisp.</Paragraph>
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