Introduction to Chinese Natural Language Processing

Book excerpt: This book introduces Chinese language-processing issues and techniques to readers who already have a basic background in natural language processing (NLP). Since the major difference between Chinese and Western languages is at the word level, the book primarily focuses on Chinese morphological analysis and introduces the concept, structure, and interword semantics of Chinese words. The following topics are covered: a general introduction to Chinese NLP; Chinese characters, morphemes, and words and the characteristics of Chinese words that have to be considered in NLP applications; Chinese word segmentation; unknown word detection; word meaning and Chinese linguistic resources; interword semantics based on word collocation and NLP techniques for collocation extraction. Table of Contents: Introduction / Words in Chinese / Challenges in Chinese Morphological Processing / Chinese Word Segmentation / Unknown Word Identification / Word Meaning / Chinese Collocations / Automatic Chinese Collocation Extraction / Appendix / References / Author Biographies