Essays on Writing and Language in Honor - Sino-Platonic Papers

Schriffst~~hrifr: fi~rsays in Honor of John DeFrancis
characters into computer, over 500 encoding schemes have been
proposed. But only several dozen of them have been adopted for
input. Generally speaking, there is a translation procedure at
the time of input with the aid of a small keyboard. Undoubtedly
it causes a lot of trouble for the user. And what is worse, it
affects the sharing of data on account of different input
schemes.
3.1.2 Segmentation: There is no space between words in a Chinese
sentence, but the basic unit in information processing is word.
Therefore the issue of segmentation has necessarily been raised.
Researchers must segment a Chinese text into separate words at
present before they do statistical lexical analysis or conduct
test for natural language understanding. It seems strange to hear
that the statistical results will vary by as many as the number
of researchers, for instance there will be three different
results if the same book is analyzed by three persons
respectively. The reason for that is the lack of a unified
principle for segmentation of words. There is no concept of ~ r d
among ordinary Chinese people. This is the harmful consequence
caused by the use of Chinese characters over a long period of
time. It is not easy for machines to do this work either. The
longest progressive match and the longest regressive match have
been tested, and still a lot of problems remain. Not only a large
amount of errors occur, but also a great deal of valuable
computer time is lost. The issue of word-segmentation may be
likened to I'a tiger standing in front of the road we cross (in
other words, a stumbling block)" if it can not be solved the
proper way.
3.1.3 Networks: The above state of affairs has already
constituted a very unfavorable condition for the setting up of
databases. To make things worse, the databases may be likened to
a pond of stagnant water if no network can be built up. However,
the current telecommunication service in China is seriously
undeveloped. To make significant progress in this field is an
imperative necessity, otherwise telecommunications will present
another stumbling block in Chinese information processing.
3.2 Problems in Chinese Terminology
3.2.1 Terminological chaos: 1.) The same term is used to express
different concepts in different fields. For example, yundonq&ijb
as a physics term refers to mthe act of changing the location of
an objectw, yet, in philosophy it refers to "the mode of
existence of matterw, in sports to "the process of physical
trainingll, and in political life to I1organized purposeful social
mass movementv1. * 2) Some terms have two meanings in the same
* corresponding to these terms in Russian are two, dvizhenie and
SDQK~; in English there are three, tpmotion", flmovementlf and
llsportl'.
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