Christoph's CJK-centered concerns

XML-schema parser for Debian

Submitted by Christoph on 2 February, 2007 - 19:19

Debian/Linux

Sometimes all you need is somebody pointing you to the stuff you were already looking for. So I wanna pass this on, and hope to help somebody else. Hopefully now you can google for "Debian XSD XML schema parser" and find this quick note:

Debian has a package called "libxml2-utils" that includes xmllint [1] which can already parse XML-schemas for some time now. As the whole world seems to use DTD, I nearly gave up on finding this tool. But here it is! Now you can parse your XSD-file with

xmllint --schema whatever.xsd

to parse the xsd document first (ignore the commandline help that shows up, too), and then you can check your XML-file with

xmllint --schema whatever.xsd myxmldoc.xml

Errors should show up at the end of the printed document.

Christoph's blog

Minimising the perceptron criterion function

Academic

For creating an example to demonstrate how to train an artificial neuron with a simple training algorithm I created a spreadsheet that trains the neuron given a truth table, initial weights and a learning rate.

It therefore uses the perceptron criterion function to train a single neuron, by adding the values of misclassified inputs to the weights in batch mode.

You can play around with different learning rates, initial weights and different functions. Each step is shown if it's adaption of the weights.

See attached file (OASIS spreadsheet).

Attachment	Size
Perceptron_criterion_function.ods	17.19 KB

Links and resources for handling the chinese language

Deutsche Resourcen sind mit eingearbeitet. My plan is to collect some useful links on topics and sites that help dealing with learning the chinese language or the handling with it in general. I don't want to link every available site but the best one on the certain topic. I will even mention a few useful books or software. Resources in german are included, too. At this point now I'm still aggregating new links in my personal bookmarks and plan to add them in a nicely ordered way here at this page. Hope I'll find the time soon.

Should you have more useful links, let me know and I'll add them here. Should you encounter encoding problems make sure you have unicode support.
Chinese news, prepared for language learners
newsinchinese.com - Actual news in chinese with annotated words, offering pinyin and english translation while moving the mouse pointer over a word. Seems to be always up to date

chinadaily.com.cn - Bilingual news on china both in english and chinese (looks broken as the time of writing).
Online tools: Dictionaries, conversion, ...
German chinaboard.de - Wörterbuch Chinesisch-Deutsch / Deutsch-Chinesisch (in der Entstehung).

German dehanci.vitadata.org - Wörterbuch Chinesisch-Deutsch / Deutsch-Chinesisch mit Wörtern und Sätzen.

mandarintools.com - English-Chinese / Chinese-English dictionary.

mandarintools.com - Character search for english, pinyin, cantonese, character and radical.

adsotrans.com - Annotate chinese text, offering pinyin and english translation while moving the mouse pointer over a word.
mandarintools.com - Add pinyin to a website (needs java).

mandarintools.com - Convert between different romanisations (needs java).
Tools for browsers (i.e. Konqueror, Firefox, Mozilla)
Shortcut for Konqueror search (Howto), dictionary look up by english translation, character or pinyin (remove the breaks): `http://www.mandarintools.com/cgi-bin/wordlook.pl? word=\{@}&searchtype=english&where=whole&audio=on` `http://www.mandarintools.com/cgi-bin/wordlook.pl? word=\{@}&searchtype=chinese&where=whole&audio=on` `http://www.mandarintools.com/cgi-bin/wordlook.pl? word=\{@}&searchtype=pinyin&where=whole&audio=on`

moji.mozdev.org - Sidebar for Firefox/Mozilla that allows lookup for marked words in websites (more languages included).
Software for learning and working with chinese
zdt.sourceforge.net - A Flashcard program useful for looking up pinyin, too. Comes as an Eclipse application. More features included.

mandarintools.com - Fully functional Java program with conversion to Pinyin, character lookup, character recognition...
Websites with more information
mandarintools.com - Home of the CEDIT dictionary that provides many useful tools for working on different romanisations, displaying pinyin for characters on websites or in files, and a set off links for learners of chinese and much more.

technology.chtsai.org - "Chih-Hao Tsai's Technology Page": information and statistics on characters and more.

chinesecomputing.com - Information on chinese used on computers.
More specific resources on chinese
unicode.org - Unihan database with lookup and table on chinese characters.
Resources for learning chinese
German chinaboard.de - Vokabelkarten zum Ausdrucken mit Kategorien für den HSK-Test und das Buch Praktisches Chinesisch.

Books

Ken Lunde: CJKV information processing : Chinese, Japanese, Korean & Vietnamese computing O'Reilly, 1999, ISBN 1565922247 - Seems to be the book for processing chinese characters on computers - examples are based on japanese quite often though.