Table Of Content

1. Introduction
2. Architecture
3. Conversion Functions

Introduction

We identify 6 elements in Chinese language, these elements are key parts in applications. These elements are (as shown in Figure 1)

Figure 1. Key Elements of Chinese Language	ZuYin	BoPoMoFo symbols
	Yin	a meaningful pronunciation
	Zhi	a Chinese character
	Tsi	a Chinese word
	TsiYin	compound of Yin for a Tsi
	Chu	a sentence

Table 1 is a list of potential softwares that may require each of the elements:

With libtabe, an application enables the knowledge of processing each element, and conversion between them. For example, an application can query a single character or a word frequency by calling a function provided by libtabe, query a single character or a word's pronunciation and reverse lookup. The complexity of processing each element increase from left to right, from top to bottom in Figure 1.

Architecture

Figure 2. Basic Architecture of libtabe

Figure 2 depicts the basic architecture of libtabe. The solid line with one-way arrow means there's a strong relationship and can be converted. All the conversions are supported by libtabe. Detailed explanations on how the conversion are done can be found in Conversion Functions section.

Figure 2. Extended Architecture of libtabe

Despite of those elements and conversion functions, there're 3 tables and 1 database have been implemented in libtabe. Two out of the three tables are used by conversion functions, the other one is used to provide character frequency. The Tsi database provides more than 140,000 word, including the pronunciation, frequency. We planned to add some more tables and databases if they are appropriate and useful. They are shown in Figure 3.

Conversion Functions

There're eleven conversion functions in the basic architecture. Each of them is responsible for converting from one element to another. Applications frequently do conversion between elements to make use of the underlying semantics of language.

Functions 3, 4, 9, 10 are trivial ones, because of the underlying elements are all fixed length. "BoPoMoFo system and encoding in libtabe" provides useful information about conversion functions 1 and 2.