Previous work has modeled the compositionality of words by creating character-level models of meaning, reducing problems of sparsity for rare words. However, in many writing systems compositionality has an effect even on the character-level: the meaning of a character is derived by the sum of its parts. In this paper, we model this effect by creating embeddings for characters based on their visual characteristics, creating an image for the character and running it through a convolutional neural network to produce a visual character embedding. Experiments on a text classification task demonstrate that such model allows for better processing of instances with rare characters in languages such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Additionally, qualitative analyses demonstrate that our proposed model learns to focus on the parts of characters that carry semantic content, resulting in embeddings that are coherent in visual space.
Finally, there are works on improving embeddings with radicals, which explicitly splits Chinese characters into radicals based on a dictionary of what radicals are included in which characters @cite_22 @cite_28 @cite_37 . The motivation of this method is similar to ours, but is only applicable to Chinese, in contrast to the method in this paper, which works on any language for which we can render text.
@cite_28 @cite_37 @cite_22
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In this paper, we present a method to leverage radical for learning Chinese character embedding. Radical is a semantic and phonetic component of Chinese character. It plays an important role for modelling character semantics as characters with the same radical usually have similar semantic meaning and grammatical usage. However, most existing character (or word) embedding learning algorithms typically only model the syntactic contexts but ignore the radical information. As a result, they do not explicitly capture the inner semantic connections of characters via radical into the embedding space of characters. To solve this problem, we propose to incorporate the radical information for enhancing the Chinese character embedding. We present a dedicated neural architecture with a hybrid loss function, and integrate the radical information through softmax upon each character. To verify the effectiveness of the learned character embedding, we apply it on Chinese word segmentation. Experiment results on two benchmark datasets show that, our radical-enhanced method outperforms two widely-used context-based embedding learning algorithms. Languages using Chinese characters are mostly processed at word level. Inspired by recent success of deep learning, we delve deeper to character and radical levels for Chinese language processing. We propose a new deep learning technique, called “radical embedding”, with justifications based on Chinese linguistics, and validate its feasibility and utility through a set of three experiments: two in-house standard experiments on short-text categorization (STC) and Chinese word segmentation (CWS), and one in-field experiment on search ranking. We show that radical embedding achieves comparable, and sometimes even better, results than competing methods. with English, and they are not suitable for Chinese character synthesis. In this paper, we propose an unified approach for modeling and synthesizing Chinese characters. Using a three-level hierarchical representation, each character is decomposed into basic components, which forms the stroke database and radical database. In the synthesis process, we use a wavelet-based approach to select proper strokes and radicals, and some aesthetic constraints are defined based on the relationships between components, then genetic algorithm is employed to search for the optimal results which best match the aesthetic constraints. Experimental results demonstrates the effectiveness of our method. Traditional methods in Chinese typography synthesis view characters as an assembly of radicals and strokes, but they rely on manual definition of the key points, which is still time-costing. Some recent work on computer vision proposes a brand new approach: to treat every Chinese character as an independent and inseparable image, so the pre-processing and post-processing of each character can be avoided. Then with a combination of a transfer network and a discriminating network, one typography can be well transferred to another. Despite the quite satisfying performance of the model, the training process requires to be supervised, which means in the training data each character in the source domain and the target domain needs to be perfectly paired. Sometimes the pairing is time-costing, and sometimes there is no perfect pairing, such as the pairing between traditional Chinese and simplified Chinese characters. In this paper, we proposed an unsupervised typography transfer method which doesn't need pairing.