Feature analysis of Chinese characters plays a prominent role in “character-based” education. However, there is an urgent need for a text analysis system for processing the difficulty of composing components for characters, primarily based on Chinese learners’ performance. To meet this need, the purpose of this research was to provide such a system by adapting a data-driven approach. Based on Chen et al.’s (2011) Chinese Orthography Database, this research has designed and developed an system: Character Difficulty - Research on Multi-features (CD-ROM). This system provides three functions: (1) analyzing a text and providing its difficulty regarding Chinese characters; (2) decomposing characters into components and calculating the frequency of components based on the analyzed text; and (3) affording component-deriving characters based on the analyzed text and downloadable images as teaching materials. With these functions highlighting multi-level features of characters, this system has the potential to benefit the fields of Chinese character instruction, Chinese orthographic learning, and Chinese natural language processing.

This work developed a Chinese humor corpus containing 3,365 jokes collected from over 40 sources. Each joke was labeled with five levels of funniness, eight skill sets of humor, and six dimensions of intent by only one annotator. To validate the manual labels, we trained SVM (Support Vector Machine) and BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) with half of the corpus (labeled by one annotator) to predict the skill and intent labels of the other half (labeled by the other annotator). Based on two assumptions that a valid manually labeled corpus should follow, our results showed the validity for the skill and intent labels. As to the funniness label, the validation results showed that the correlation between the corpus label and user feedback rating is marginal, which implies that the funniness level is a harder annotation problem to be solved. The contribution of this work is two folds: 1) a Chinese humor corpus is developed with labels of humor skills, intents, and funniness, which allows machines to learn more intricate humor framing, effect, and amusing level to predict and respond in proper context (https://github.com/SamTseng/Chinese_Humor_MultiLabeled). 2) An approach to verify whether a minimum human labeled corpus is valid or not, which facilitates the validation of low-resource corpora.