Orthographic similarity search for dictionary lookup of Japanese words

Finding an unknown Japanese word in a dictionary is a difficult and slow task when one or more of the word’s characters is unknown. For advanced learners, unknown characters evoke the form and meaning of visually similar characters they are familiar with. We propose a range of character distance metrics to allow learners to leverage known characters to search for words containing unknown but visually similar characters. This new form of dictionary search is implemented as an extension to the FOKS dictionary system.