  Chinese characters have a complex and hierarchical graphical structure
carrying both semantic and phonetic information. We use this structure to
enhance the text model and obtain better results in standard NLP operations.
First of all, to tackle the problem of graphical variation we define
allographic classes of characters. Next, the relation of inclusion of a
subcharacter in a characters, provides us with a directed graph of allographic
classes. We provide this graph with two weights: semanticity (semantic relation
between subcharacter and character) and phoneticity (phonetic relation) and
calculate "most semantic subcharacter paths" for each character. Finally,
adding the information contained in these paths to unigrams we claim to
increase the efficiency of text mining methods. We evaluate our method on a
text classification task on two corpora (Chinese and Japanese) of a total of 18
million characters and get an improvement of 3% on an already high baseline of
89.6% precision, obtained by a linear SVM classifier. Other possible
applications and perspectives of the system are discussed.
