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.

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

Kam-Fai Wong obtained his Ph.D. from Edinburgh University, Scotland, in 1987. At present, he is a professor in the Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management, the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) as well as an adjunct professor of Northeastern University and Peking University, China. His research interest centers on Chinese computing, parallel database and information retrieval. He has published over 200 technical papers in these areas in various international journals and conferences and books. He is the founding Editor-In-Chief of ACM Transactions on Asian Language Processing (TALIP), a co-editor-in-chief of International Journal on Computer Processing of Oriental Languages, and a member of the editorial board of the Journal on Distributed and Parallel Databases, International Journal on Computational Linguistics and Chinese Language Processing and Journal of Chinese Processing (China). He is the conference co-chair of APWeb'08, Shenyang and AIRS'2008, Harbin, China; Program Co-chair of IJCNLP'2005, Jeju, Korea; and panel co-chair of VLDB2002.