Automatic Online Educational Game Content Creation by Identifying Similar Chinese Characters with Radical Extraction and Graph Matching Algorithms

Abstract

One of the difficulties in learning Chinese characters is distinguishing similar characters. This can cause misunderstanding and miscommunication in daily life. Thus, it is important for students learning the Chinese language to be able to distinguish similar characters and understand their proper usage. In this paper, the authors propose a game style framework to train students to distinguish similar characters. A major component in this framework is the search for similar Chinese characters in the system. From the authors’ prior work, they find the similar characters by the radical information and stroke correspondence determination. This paper improves the stroke correspondence determination by using the attributed relational graph (ARG) matching algorithm that considers both the stroke and spatial relationship during matching. The experimental results show that the new proposed method is more accurate in finding similar Chinese characters. Additionally, the authors have implemented online educational games to train students to distinguish similar Chinese characters and made use of the improved matching method for creating the game content automatically.