Development of Web Search and Retrieval System with Word Search Support

抄録

Learning by investigation using the Internet is going on in the context of school education. Web retrieval systems are useful for that purpose. When primary school students use particular terminology as keywords to retrieve information over the Internet, however, they will not be able to retrieve the desired information unless they enter the terms using the correct Chinese characters (hereafter kanji characters). As it happens, there are terms with kanji characters that young children will not have learned yet, in which case they will not be able to retrieve the correct information. The present research was conducted, therefore, to develop a retrieval support system with word conversion capability that will accept input in a kana syllabary or in a mixture of kana and kanji characters and still convert that input into the proper kanji characters. Using this system, entering search terms in kana or a mixture of kana and kanji characters will retrieve the same results as when entering those terms using only kanji characters. Moreover, even if one or two incorrect kanji characters are entered as part of a term, the system will select similar study terms and display them. Therefore primary school students whose learning of kanji characters is still incomplete will also be able to carry out correct searching and retrieval.