Article history: Received 17 May 2009 Available online 19 January 2011 Communicated by Gilles Schaeffer

Common Chinese characters between Japanese and Chinese have been proved to be effective in Japanese-Chinese phrase alignment. Besides common Chinese characters, Japanese and Chinese also share many other semantically equivalent Chinese characters. However, there are no available resources for this kind of Chinese characters. In this paper, we propose a statistical method aiming to detect these ...