by Poon Chi-cheung. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1993. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 82-84). / Abstract / Acknowledgments / Preface / Chapter Chapter 1: --- Font Systems --- p.1 / Representations of Character Images --- p.1 / Characteristics of Chinese Font System --- p.3 / Large Character Set --- p.3 / Condensed Strokes --- p.4 / Low Repetition Rate --- p.5 / WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) --- p.6 / Chapter Chapter 2: --- Human Visual System and Gray Scale Font --- p.9 / Human Visual System --- p.9 / Physiology --- p.9 / Spatial Frequencies --- p.10 / How much resolution is enough --- p.11 / Screen and Printer --- p.12 / Raster Display Devices --- p.13 / Printer --- p.14 / Resolution --- p.15 / Gray Scale Font --- p.15 / Generation of Gray Scale Font --- p.18 / Chapter Chapter 3: --- Digital Filtering Method for Gray Scale Font --- p.19 / Filtering Process --- p.19 / Weighted Functions --- p.21 / Generation of Gray Scale Character --- p.23 / Results --- p.24 / More Experiments --- p.24 / Problems --- p.26 / Speed and Storage --- p.26 / Impression of Strokes --- p.27 / Thin strokes in the small-size character --- p.30 / New Approach to Generate Gray Scale Font --- p.30 / Chapter Chapter 4: --- Rasterization Algorithms --- p.32 / Outline Font --- p.32 / TrueType Font --- p.33 / Scan Conversion --- p.35 / Basic Outline-to-Bitmap Conversion --- p.35 / Scan-converting Polygon --- p.36 / Rasterization of a character --- p.36 / Intersecting Points and Ranges --- p.37 / Straight Lines --- p.37 / Quadratic Bezier Curves --- p.38 / Implementation Techniques --- p.39 / Approximation of quadratic Bezier curve by straight lines --- p.39 / Simplification of the Filling Process --- p.41 / The Rasterization Algorithm --- p.45 / Chapter Chapter 5: --- Direct Rasterization with Gray Scale --- p.46 / Rasterization with Gray Scale --- p.46 / Determination of Gray Value of Boundary-pixel --- p.50 / Preliminary Results --- p.54 / Hinting --- p.56 / Rasterization with Hinting --- p.56 / Strokes Migration --- p.57 / Hints Finding --- p.59 / Chapter Chapter 6: --- Results and Conclusion --- p.62 / Quality --- p.66 / Comparison with Black-and-White Character --- p.66 / Hinted Against Unhinted --- p.71 / Generation Speeds --- p.75 / Discussion and Comments --- p.78 / Practical Font System --- p.79 / Conclusion --- p.80 / Bibliography --- p.82

This dissertation explores the global history of Chinese script reforms—the effort to phoneticize Chinese language and/or simplify the writing system—from its inception in the 1890s to its demise in the 1980s. These reforms took place at the intersection of industrialization, colonialism, and new information technologies, such as alphabet-based telegraphy and breakthroughs in printing technologies. As these social and technological transformations put unprecedented pressure on knowledge management and the use of mental and clerical labor, many Chinese intellectuals claimed that learning Chinese characters consumed too much time and mental energy. Chinese script reforms, this dissertation argues, were an effort to increase speed in producing, transmitting, and accessing information, and thus meet the demands of the industrializing knowledge economy. The industrializing knowledge economy that this dissertation explores was built on and sustained by a psychological understanding of the human subject as a knowledge machine, and it was part of a global moment in which the optimization of labor in knowledge production was a key concern for all modernizing economies. While Chinese intellectuals were inventing new signs of inscription, American behavioral psychologists, Soviet psycho-economists, and Central Asian and Ottoman technicians were all experimenting with new scripts in order to increase mental efficiency and productivity. This dissertation reveals the intimate connections between the Chinese and non-Chinese script engineering projects that were taking place synchronically across the world. The chapters of this work demonstrate for the first time, for instance, that the simplification of Chinese characters in the 1920s and 1930s was intimately connected to the discipline of behavioral psychology in the US. The first generation of Chinese psychologists employed the American psychologists’ methods to track eye movements, count word-frequencies, and statistically analyze the speed of reading, writing, and memorizing in order to simplify and “rationalize” the Chinese writing system in an effort to discipline and optimize mental labor. Other chapters explore the issue of mental and clerical optimization by finding the origins of the Chinese Latin Alphabet (CLA), the mother of pinyin, in hitherto unknown Eurasian connections. The CLA, the pages of this work shows, was the product of a transnational exchange that involved Ottoman and Transcaucasian typographers as well as Russian engineers and Chinese communists who sought efficiency in knowledge production through inventing new scripts. Situating the Chinese script reforms at this global intersection of psychology, economy, and linguistics, this dissertation examines the global connections and forces that turned the human subject into a knowledge worker who was cognitively managed through education, literacy, propaganda, and other measures of organizing information, all of which had the script at the center. The search for efficiency and productivity—the core values of industrialism—lay at the heart of script reforms in China, but this search was inseparable from linguistic orders and political ambitions. Even if writing, transmitting, and learning a phonetic script could theoretically be easier and more efficient than the Chinese characters, the alphabet opened a veritable Pandora’s Box around the issue of selection: given the complex linguistic landscape in China, which speech was a phonetic script supposed to represent? There were myriad languages spoken throughout the empire and the subsequent nation-state, most of which were mutually incomprehensible. Mandarin as spoken in Beijing was different from that spoken in the south, and “topolects” or regional languages such as Min or Cantonese were to Mandarin what Romanian is to English. As a linguistic life-or-death issue, phonetic scripts stood for the infrastructural possibilities and limitations in the representation of speeches. Some scripts, such as Lao Naixuan’s phonetic script composed of more than a hundred signs, were capable of representing multiple Mandarin and non-Mandarin speeches; whereas others, such as Phonetic Symbols that only has thirty-seven syllabic signs, represented only one speech, i.e., Mandarin. Using Mandarin-oriented scripts to transcribe non-Mandarin speeches was like writing English with fifteen letters, hence the acrimonious disputes that fill the pages of this dissertation. Succinctly put, it was at the level of script invention that Chinese and non-Chinese actors engineered different infrastructures not only for laboring minds but also for the social world of Chinese languages. The history of information technologies and knowledge economy in China was thus inseparable from the world of speech and language, as each script offered a new potential to reassemble the written matter and the speaking mind in a different way. “Codes of Modernity” thus conceptualizes the script itself as an infrastructural medium. A script was not merely a passive carrier of information, but an existential artifact. Building on an expanding literature on infrastructures, it endorses the observation that infrastructures, technologies, and the social world around them work in a recursive loop. An infrastructure is not just the physical object that permits the flow of information, goods, ideas, and people, but a sociotechnical product that enables the experience of culture, while imposing constrains on it at the same time. Like electricity grids, transportation systems, and sewage canals, the experience of scripts as infrastructures is the experience of thought worlds. After a long tradition of structuralism and poststructuralism that sought to understand the world through the semiotic prism of language, “Codes of Modernity” argues that it is time for an infrastructuralism that excavates the indispensable media that enable the production of language and thought.

by Yen-Hui Hung. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1997. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 76-78). / Abstract --- p.i / Acknowledgments --- p.iii / Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 2 --- Background ® / Chapter 2.1 --- Multilingual Information Processing --- p.6 / Chapter 2.1.1 --- Codesets --- p.6 / Chapter 2.1.2 --- Converters --- p.8 / Chapter 2.1.3 --- Collations --- p.8 / Chapter 2.1.4 --- Internationalization and Localization --- p.9 / Chapter 2.2 --- OBST --- p.10 / Chapter 2.3 --- Related Work --- p.11 / Chapter 2.3.1 --- Sybase --- p.11 / Chapter 2.3.2 --- Oracle --- p.13 / Chapter 2.3.3 --- COBASE --- p.15 / Chapter 2.3.4 --- SQL92 Standard --- p.15 / Chapter 3 --- Defects of Existing Systems and Proposed Language Extensions --- p.21 / Chapter 3.1 --- Defects of Existing Methods - Locale Model --- p.22 / Chapter 3.2 --- Defects of SQL92 --- p.22 / Chapter 3.3 --- Proposed Language Extensions --- p.24 / Chapter 3.3.1 --- Inserting tuples --- p.24 / Chapter 3.3.2 --- Updating tuples --- p.25 / Chapter 3.3.3 --- Querying (Retrieving tuples) --- p.26 / Chapter 3.3.4 --- String matching --- p.26 / Chapter 3.3.5 --- Performing Joins --- p.28 / Chapter 3.3.6 --- Sorting and Indexing --- p.30 / Chapter 4 --- DBMS Design and Implementation --- p.32 / Chapter 4.1 --- System Architecture --- p.34 / Chapter 4.2 --- Lexical Analyzer and Parser --- p.36 / Chapter 4.3 --- Database Objects --- p.37 / Chapter 4.4 --- Data Dictionary --- p.39 / Chapter 4.5 --- Character Objects Related Facilities --- p.41 / Chapter 4.5.1 --- Codesets --- p.42 / Chapter 4.5.2 --- Collations --- p.46 / Chapter 4.5.3 --- Converters --- p.48 / Chapter 4.6 --- Indexing --- p.50 / Chapter 4.7 --- Query Processor --- p.52 / Chapter 4.7.1 --- Join --- p.54 / Chapter 4.7.2 --- Sorting tuples - the order by clause --- p.54 / Chapter 4.7.3 --- "Group Structure, Aggregate Functions and Projection" --- p.55 / Chapter 4.8 --- Scalar and Conditional Expressions --- p.56 / Chapter 4.8.1 --- Representation of Scalar and Condition Expressions --- p.57 / Chapter 4.8.2 --- Implementations --- p.58 / Chapter 4.9 --- User Interface --- p.59 / Chapter 5 --- Case Study - A Bookshop --- p.62 / Chapter 5.1 --- Creating tables and inserting tuples --- p.62 / Chapter 5.2 --- Updating Tuples --- p.65 / Chapter 5.3 --- Querying --- p.65 / Chapter 5.4 --- String Matching --- p.66 / Chapter 5.5 --- Performing Joins --- p.67 / Chapter 5.6 --- Ordering Display --- p.68 / Chapter 5.7 --- Indexing --- p.70 / Chapter 6 --- Conclusions and Future Work --- p.73 / Bibliography --- p.76 / Chapter A --- Grammer Rules --- p.79 / Chapter A.1 --- Data Definition Language --- p.79 / Chapter A.2 --- Data Manipulation Language --- p.82 / Chapter A.3 --- Condition Expressions --- p.83 / Chapter A.4 --- Scalar Expressions --- p.84 / Chapter A.5 --- Data Type --- p.85 / Chapter A.6 --- Names and Identifiers --- p.87 / Chapter A.7 --- Lexical Element --- p.88 / Chapter B --- Programmers' Guide --- p.90 / Chapter B.l --- Charset.obst --- p.92 / Chapter B.2 --- Table.obst --- p.95 / Chapter B.3 --- dbSchema.obst --- p.101 / Chapter B.4 --- dbEnv.obst --- p.103 / Chapter B.5 --- Query.obst --- p.104 / Chapter B.6 --- Misc.obst and External.obst --- p.117 / Chapter B.7 --- Main --- p.118 / Chapter B.8 --- RPC interfaces --- p.120 / Chapter C --- Installation Manual --- p.122 / Chapter C.l --- Steps to install the DBMS server --- p.123 / Chapter C.2 --- Steps to install the WWW client --- p.124 / Chapter D --- User Manual --- p.125 / Chapter D.l --- User Interface Layout --- p.125 / Chapter D.2 --- Steps in Performing Database Operations --- p.128 / Chapter D.2.1 --- Creating new tables --- p.129 / Chapter D.2.2 --- Browsing existing tables --- p.131 / Chapter D.2.3 --- Inserting new records --- p.131 / Chapter D.2.4 --- Deleting records --- p.132 / Chapter D.2.5 --- Creating indexes --- p.132 / Chapter D.2.6 --- Showing existing schemas and tables --- p.133

published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

No description available.

published_or_final_version / Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Science in Information Technology in Education

by Tham Yiu-Man. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1993. / Includes bibliographical references. / Abstract --- p.i / Acknowledgements --- p.iii / Table of Contents --- p.iv / Chapter Chapter I --- Introduction / Chapter 1.1 --- Introduction --- p.1-1 / Chapter 1.2 --- Survey on Chinese Character Recognition --- p.1-4 / Chapter 1.3 --- Methodology Adopts in Our System --- p.1-7 / Chapter 1.4 --- Contributions and Organization of the Thesis --- p.1-11 / Chapter Chapter II --- Pre-processing and Stroke Extraction / Chapter 2.1 --- Introduction --- p.2-1 / Chapter 2.2 --- Thinning --- p.2-1 / Chapter 2.2.1 --- Introduction to Thinning --- p.2-1 / Chapter 2.2.2 --- Proposed Thinning Algorithm Cater for Stroke Extraction --- p.2-6 / Chapter 2.2.3 --- Thinning Results --- p.2-9 / Chapter 2.3 --- Stroke Extraction --- p.2-13 / Chapter 2.3.1 --- Introduction to Stroke Extraction --- p.2-13 / Chapter 2.3.2 --- Proposed Stroke Extraction Method --- p.2-14 / Chapter 2.3.2.1 --- Fork point detection --- p.2-16 / Chapter 2.3.2.2 --- 8-connected fork point merging --- p.2-18 / Chapter 2.3.2.3 --- Sub-stroke extraction --- p.2-18 / Chapter 2.3.2.4 --- Fork point merging --- p.2-19 / Chapter 2.3.2.5 --- Sub-stroke connection --- p.2-24 / Chapter 2.3.3 --- Stroke Extraction Accuracy --- p.2-27 / Chapter 2.3.4 --- Corner Detection --- p.2-29 / Chapter 2.3.4.1 --- Introduction to Corner Detection --- p.2-29 / Chapter 2.3.4.2 --- Proposed Corner Detection Formulation --- p.2-30 / Chapter 2.4 --- Concluding Remarks --- p.2-33 / Chapter Chapter III --- Four Corner Code / Chapter 3.1 --- Introduction --- p.3-1 / Chapter 3.2 --- Deletion of Hook Strokes --- p.3-3 / Chapter 3.3 --- Stroke Types Selection --- p.3-5 / Chapter 3.4 --- Probability Formulations of Stroke Types --- p.3-7 / Chapter 3.4.1 --- Simple Strokes --- p.3-7 / Chapter 3.4.2 --- Square --- p.3-8 / Chapter 3.4.3 --- Cross --- p.3-10 / Chapter 3.4.4 --- Upper Right Corner --- p.3-12 / Chapter 3.4.5 --- Lower Left Corner --- p.3-12 / Chapter 3.5 --- Corner Segments Extraction Procedure --- p.3-14 / Chapter 3.5.1 --- Corner Segment Probability --- p.3-21 / Chapter 3.5.2 --- Corner Segment Extraction --- p.3-23 / Chapter 3.6 4 --- C Codes Generation --- p.3-26 / Chapter 3.7 --- Parameters Determination --- p.3-29 / Chapter 3.8 --- Sensitivity Test --- p.3-31 / Chapter 3.9 --- Classification Rate --- p.3-32 / Chapter 3.10 --- Feedback by Corner Segments --- p.3-34 / Chapter 3.11 --- Classification Rate with Feedback by Corner Segment --- p.3-37 / Chapter 3.12 --- Reasons for Mis-classification --- p.3-38 / Chapter 3.13 --- Suggested Solution to the Mis-interpretation of Stroke Type --- p.3-41 / Chapter 3.14 --- Reduce Size of Candidate Set by No.of Input Segments --- p.3-43 / Chapter 3.15 --- Extension to Higher Order Code --- p.3-45 / Chapter 3.16 --- Concluding Remarks --- p.3-46 / Chapter Chapter IV --- Relaxation / Chapter 4.1 --- Introduction --- p.4-1 / Chapter 4.1.1 --- Introduction to Relaxation --- p.4-1 / Chapter 4.1.2 --- Formulation of Relaxation --- p.4-2 / Chapter 4.1.3 --- Survey on Chinese Character Recognition by using Relaxation --- p.4-5 / Chapter 4.2 --- Relaxation Formulations --- p.4-9 / Chapter 4.2.1 --- Definition of Neighbour Segments --- p.4-9 / Chapter 4.2.2 --- Formulation of Initial Probability Assignment --- p.4-12 / Chapter 4.2.3 --- Formulation of Compatibility Function --- p.4-14 / Chapter 4.2.4 --- Formulation of Support from Neighbours --- p.4-16 / Chapter 4.2.5 --- Stopping Criteria --- p.4-17 / Chapter 4.2.6 --- Distance Measures --- p.4-17 / Chapter 4.2.7 --- Parameters Determination --- p.4-21 / Chapter 4.3 --- Recognition Rate --- p.4-23 / Chapter 4.4 --- Reasons for Mis-recognition in Relaxation --- p.4-27 / Chapter 4.5 --- Introduction of No-label Class --- p.4-31 / Chapter 4.5.1 --- No-label Initial Probability --- p.4-31 / Chapter 4.5.2 --- No-label Compatibility Function --- p.4-32 / Chapter 4.5.3 --- Improvement by No-label Class --- p.4-33 / Chapter 4.6 --- Rate of Convergence --- p.4-35 / Chapter 4.6.1 --- Updating Formulae in Exponential Form --- p.4-38 / Chapter 4.7 --- Comparison with Yamamoto et al's Relaxation Method --- p.4-40 / Chapter 4.7.1 --- Formulations in Yamamoto et al's Relaxation Method --- p.4-40 / Chapter 4.7.2 --- Modifications in [YAMAM82] --- p.4-42 / Chapter 4.7.3 --- Performance Comparison with [YAMAM82] --- p.4-43 / Chapter 4.8 --- System Overall Recognition Rate --- p.4-45 / Chapter 4.9 --- Concluding Remarks --- p.4-48 / Chapter Chapter V --- Concluding Remarks / Chapter 5.1 --- Recapitulation and Conclusions --- p.5-1 / Chapter 5.2 --- Limitations in the System --- p.5-4 / Chapter 5.3 --- Suggestions for Further Developments --- p.5-6 / References --- p.R-1 / Appendix User's Guide / Chapter A .l --- System Functions --- p.A-1 / Chapter A.2 --- Platform and Compiler --- p.A-1 / Chapter A.3 --- File List --- p.A-2 / Chapter A.4 --- Directory --- p.A-3 / Chapter A.5 --- Description of Sub-routines --- p.A-3 / Chapter A.6 --- Data Structures and Header Files --- p.A-12 / Chapter A.7 --- Character File charfile Structure --- p.A-15 / Chapter A.8 --- Suggested Program to Implement the System --- p.A-17

by Lau Chi Ching, Donny. / Thesis (M.Sc.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1993. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves [71]). / Chapter 1. --- Introduction / Chapter 1.1 --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 1.2 --- Comparison of Phonetic and Written Character Input --- p.2 / Chapter 1.3 --- Significance of Phonetic Input --- p.4 / Chapter 1.4 --- Drawbacks of Current Phonetic Input Methods --- p.4 / Chapter 2. --- Objectives of the Research / Chapter 2.1 --- Main Objectives --- p.6 / Chapter 2.2 --- User Background Pre-requisite --- p.8 / Chapter 2.3 --- Roman-Spelling (Recommended Phonetic Scheme) --- p.9 / Chapter 2.4 --- User Input and the Output Scenario --- p.10 / Chapter 2.5 --- Outline of Free-Style Phonetic Input Processing --- p.15 / Chapter 3. --- Lexical Analyser / Chapter 3.1 --- Overview of Lexical Analyser --- p.17 / Chapter 3.2 --- Identification of Character Boundary --- p.19 / Chapter 3.3 --- Lexical Tree --- p.20 / Chapter 4. --- Selection Module / Chapter 4.1 --- Overview of Selection Module --- p.23 / Chapter 4.2 --- Fault-tolerance Capability --- p.24 / Chapter 4.3 --- Group Table (Groups of Similar Sounds) --- p.26 / Chapter 4.4 --- Distance Calculation Algorithm --- p.30 / Chapter 4.4.1 --- Character Dictionary --- p.31 / Chapter 4.4.2 --- Phrase Dictionary --- p.33 / Chapter 4.4.3 --- Hashing Key of the Dictionaries --- p.35 / Chapter 4.4.4 --- Maintenance of Dictionaries --- p.36 / Chapter 4.4.5 --- Distance Calculation of Character Input --- p.37 / Chapter 4.4.5.1 --- Examples of Character Output --- p.39 / Chapter 4.4.6 --- Distance Calculation of Phrase Input --- p.40 / Chapter 4.4.6.1 --- Examples of Phrase Output --- p.44 / Chapter 4.4.7 --- Explanation of Algorithm --- p.45 / Chapter 5. --- Syntax Analyser / Chapter 5.1 --- Overview of Syntax Analyser --- p.46 / Chapter 5.2 --- Overview of a Chinese Simple Sentence --- p.47 / Chapter 5.3 --- Testing Simple Sentence Rules --- p.48 / Chapter 5.3.1 --- NDFA for Chinese Grammar Rules --- p.49 / Chapter 5.4 --- Syntax Analysis Algorithm --- p.51 / Chapter 5.4.1 --- Explanation of Algorithm --- p.52 / Chapter 5.4.2 --- Justification of Algorithm --- p.54 / Chapter 5.4.3 --- Examples of Syntax Analysis --- p.55 / Chapter 5.5 --- Parse Tree for Semantic Analysis --- p.59 / Chapter 6. --- Division of Technical Work --- p.61 / Chapter 7. --- Applied Areas of the Research / Chapter 7.1 --- Chinese User Interface with Operating System --- p.63 / Chapter 7.2 --- Bilingual Programming Language Editor --- p.64 / Chapter 7.3 --- Development of a Chinese Programming Language --- p.66 / Chapter 7.4 --- Putonghua Training --- p.67 / Chapter 8. --- Conclusions and Future Improvements / Chapter 8.1 --- Conclusions --- p.68 / Chapter 8.2 --- Future Improvements --- p.69 / References / Appendix A

by Chan Shing Chi, Michael. / Thesis (M.Ph.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1987. / Bibliography: leaves [112]-[114]