Decomposition of reduced character of Chinese Guqin notation

Reduced notations have great historical and artistic value, which are composed of reduced characters. In the paper, the approach of reduced character interpretation is discussed. Reduced character decomposition is the key step of this approach. A method of two-stage heuristic search is proposed for the decomposition. The first stage search is applied to extract candidate radicals from a character. And the second stage search is used to find a radical combination that best matches the character among the candidate radicals. The radical distance measure is essential to the search. A novel radical distance measure is presented in the paper. Experimental results show our method has a good performance in reduced character decomposition.