Abstract
The Japanese character set consists of Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji. Some Kanji characters have the variants that have the same meaning and pronunciations. The users of full-text retrieval systems sometimes confuse some Kanji characters with the variants and get insufficient result for their needs. The authors considered that a function that unifies Kanji variants is need for full-text retrieval systems. This paper describes a full-text retrieval system that has functions of unifying Kanji variants. The system has a thesaurus of Japanese Kanji variants and uses it for indexing and unifying Kanji characters. The authors built two example retrieval systems based on the system. They have the database of ULIS-DL (http : //lib.ulis.ac.jp/) metadata and Japan-MARC.
