Mighty Morphin Morphology

Boy.pockets Wrote:As I understand, it finds the readings for individual kanji given a word.

Correct. It also goes through every word in JMdict and builds a database of those readings. That is, if it can successfully figure out the word. That way, we can search by readings. It's important to note that it solves the reading by using a kanji's dictionary reading. There's no guesswork involved. So, for a word like 日帰り = ひがえり, results look like this:
So for 帰 = がえり, it knows the reading came from かえ.る and it knows it got to it by adding a ゛to the main reading and inflecting the okurigana (that's why it has two tags). So this reading doesn't link back to an entry for "がえり", but the original "かえ.る".

Boy.pockets Wrote:I guess that this is what you are already thinking of, but I will say it anyway.

That's the basic idea. I think the real issue is deciding which words are useful for you. Especially when you know a lot of readings, I would imagine you would get a lot of results from an n + .5 (or n + 0, for that matter).

Anyway, there is lots of experimenting to do.