Chinese word segmentation at Peking University

Word segmentation is the first step in Chinese information processing, and the performance of the segmenter, therefore, has a direct and great influence on the processing steps that follow. Different segmenters will give different results when handling issues like word boundary. And we will present in this paper that there is no need for an absolute definition of word boundary for all segmenters, and that different results of segmentation shall be acceptable if they can help to reach a correct syntactic analysis in the end.