RadicalLocator: a software tool for identifying radicals in Chinese characters

Abstract

This article describes a new software tool called RadicalLocator that can be used to automatically identify (e.g., for visual inspection) individual target radicals (i.e., groups of strokes) in written Chinese characters. We first briefly clarify why this software is useful for research purposes and discuss the factors that make this pattern recognition task so difficult. We then describe how the software can be downloaded and installed, and used to identify the radicals in characters for the purposes of, for example, selecting materials for psycholinguistic experiments. Finally, we discuss several known limitations of the software and heuristics for addressing them.