The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

What I mean is a word that only appears once or twice in many recipes, but always in the same position when used within a recipe. For example, the word "grows" or the phrase "also known as". If you were to find a VMS match for a word like this, showing a positional match across recipes, that would be interesting.

And that is indeed (part of) what I am doing.  

In my Chinese SBJ file, 216 out of 363 entries (~60%) have a  主 ("Mainly for") within the first 10 Chinese characters.  In the VMS, that 主 maps to daiin or a few variations thereof.  I count 148 out 243 "good" parags (~60%) that have one of those strings within the first 50 letters (ignoring spaces).  And on average 1 Chinese character corresponds almost exactly to 5 EVA letters.

With something like "daiin", it is so common throughout the text that it will undoubtedly coincidentally match with something.

Even when I have a single 主 in the Chinese text, my programs often fail to find a good match -- that has a daiin or one of its allowed variants, and the right number of EVA letters before and after it, plus or minus a few letters.  

But I have another good crib, 气 ("vital essence" or "vital energy") that matches chedy in the VMS or a few variations thereof.  It occurs in 242 out of 363 recipes.   When the recipe has both 主 and 气,  my programs do what you show in your images.  Even better when the recipe has more than one of either keyword.  

I have 2-3 other candidates for cribs, but I am not sure of them yet.

All the best, --stolfi