kanjiindicates

Kanjiindicates is a term used in the field of Japanese linguistics and digital text processing to describe a metadata layer attached to individual kanji characters. In this scheme, each character carries indicators that signal information relevant to reading, meaning, or usage. The indicators are not part of the character glyph itself but are attached as annotations in dictionaries, corpora, or rendering systems.

Purpose and scope: The primary goal is disambiguation and learning. Kanjiindicates can help distinguish multiple readings for a single kanji, identify semantic categories, and assist NLP tasks such as morphological analysis, sentence segmentation, and kanji-to-reading conversion. They also support educational tools by surfacing structured hints about a character's pronunciation, senses, and common compounds.

Typical content: A kanjiindicates annotation may include fields such as readings (onyomi and kunyomi), semantic field, radical or stroke count, frequency, and example words or compounds. Annotations can be implemented as inline markers, separate dictionaries, or machine-readable formats (XML, JSON) and may be presented to users as furigana equivalents or tooltips.

Relation to existing resources: Kanjiindicates draws on established resources such as kanji dictionaries, furigana systems, and linguistic ontologies. It complements systems like ruby text, kanji dictionaries, and digital lexicons by providing structured metadata rather than altering the orthography itself.