The CJK Dictionary Institute, Inc.

About the Author

JACK HALPERN

President, The CJK Dictionary Institute
株式会社日中韓辭典研究所
Editor-in-Chief, Kanji Dictionary Publishing Society
Research Fellow, Showa Women’s University

Born in Germany in 1946, Jack Halpern lived in six countries and knows twelve languages. Fascinated by kanji while living in an Israeli kibbutz, he came to Japan in 1973, where he compiled the New Japanese-English Character Dictionary for sixteen years. He is a professional lexicographer/writer and lectures widely on Japanese culture, is winner of first prize in the International Speech Contest in Japanese, and is founder of the International Unicycling Federation.

Jack Halpern is currently the editor-in-chief of the Kanji Dictionary Publishing Society (KDPS), a non-profit organization that specializes in compiling kanji dictionaries, and the head of the The CJK Dictionary Institute (CJKI), which specializes in CJK lexicography and the development of a comprehensive CJK database (DESK). He has also compiled the world’s first Unicode dictionary of CJK characters.

List of Publications

Following is a list of the author’s principal publications in the field of CJK lexicography.

• Halpern, Jack (1982): “Linguistic Analysis of the Function of Kanji in Modern Japanese,” 27th International Conference of Orientalists in Tokyo.
• Halpern, Jack (1985): “Function of Kanji in Modern Japanese, ” Transactions of the International Conference of Orientalists in Japan. The Tōhō Gakkai (The Institute of Eastern Culture). 27th International Conference of Orientalists in Japan in Tokyo.
• Halpern, Jack (1985): “Kenkyusha’s New Japanese-English Character Dictionary,” Calico Journal, December 1985.
• Halpern, Jack (1987): 漢字の再発見 Kanji no Saihakken ‘Rediscovering Chinese Characters’. Tokyo: Shodensha.
• Halpern, Jack (1990): New Japanese-English Character Dictionary (Sixth Printing). Tokyo: Kenkyusha.
• Halpern, Jack (1990): “New Japanese-English Character Dictionary: A Semantic Approach to Kanji Lexicography,” Euralex ’90 Proceedings. Actas del IV Congreso Internacional, 157-166. Benalmádena (Málaga): Bibliograf.
• Halpern, Jack (1993): NTC’s New Japanese-English Character Dictionary. Chicago: National Textbook Company.
• Halpern Jack, Nomura Masaaki, and Fukada Atsushi (1994): “Building a Comprehensive Chinese Character Database,” Euralex ’94 Proceedings. International Congress on Lexicography in Amsterdam.
• Halpern, Jack (1995): New Japanese-English Character Dictionary, Electronic Book Edition. Tokyo: Nichigai Associates.
• Halpern, Jack (1998): “Building A Comprehensive Database for the Compilation of Integrated Kanji Dictionaries and Tools,” 43rd International Conference of Orientalists in Tokyo.
• Halpern, Jack (1999): The Kodansha Kanji Learner’s Dictionary. Tokyo: Kodansha International.
• Halpern, Jack and Kerman, Jouni (1999): “The Pitfalls and Complexities of Chinese to Chinese Conversion,” Fourteenth International Unicode Conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
• Halpern, Jack (2000): “The Challenges of Intelligent Japanese Searching,” Tokyo.
• Halpern, Jack: Dictionary of Unified CJK Characters -- for the Unicode Standard. Forthcoming.

The The CJK Dictionary Institute (CJKI) consists of a small group of researchers that specialize in CJK lexicography. The society is headed by Jack Halpern, editor-in-chief of the New Japanese-English Character Dictionary, which has become a standard reference work for studying Japanese.

The principal activity of the CJKI is the development and continuous expansion of a comprehensive database that covers every aspect of how Chinese characters are used in CJK languages, including Cantonese. Advanced computational lexicography methodology has been used to compile and maintain a Unicode-based database that is serving as a source of data for:

1. Dozens of lexicographic works, including electronic dictionaries.
2. Search engine applications, such as morphological analyzers and simpified to/from traditional Chinese conversion systems.
3. CJK input method editors (IME) and front-end processors (FEP).
4. Machine translation, online translation tools and speech technology software.
5. Pedagogical, linguistic and computational lexicography research.

DESK currently has about seven million Japanese and about one million Chinese items, including detailed grammatical, phonological and semantic attributes for general vocabulary, technical terms, and hundreds of thousands of proper nouns. The single-character database covers every aspect of CJK characters, including frequency, phonology, radicals, character codes, and other attributes. See http://www.cjk.org/cjk/samples/ for a list of data resources.

The CJKI has become one of the world’s prime resources for CJK dictionary data, and is contributing to CJK information processing technology by providing software developers with high-quality lexical resources, as well as through its ongoing research activities and consulting services.

President Jack Halpern The CJK Dictionary Institute, Inc. 株式会社日中韓辭典研究所 Komine Building (3rd & 4th Floor) 34-14, 2-chome, Tohoku, Niiza-shi Saitama 352-0001 JAPAN Phone: +81-48-473-3508 Fax: +81-48-486-5032 Email: WWW: http://www.cjk.org