Interweaving of Syntax and Semantics in Algorithms For Recognising Chinese Characters

The structure of Chinese characters is reviewed and seen to be best represented as 3-layer hierarchy of character, radical and stroke. Fuzzy possibilistic reasoning is then put forward as an appropriate set of conceptual tools to investigate the automatic recognition of these characters. An associative memory artificial neural network algorithms form a suitable technique for realising these concepts. Implementing these techniques several issues are explored: vagueness of radicals, their situation, position invariance, extraction order and shape. Extensive results are obtained to demonstrate the quality of the algorithms in dealing with the range of difficulties inherent in the problem.