ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book addresses the wordhood issue in Chinese and a segmentation standard is proposed to achieve linguistic felicity, computational feasibility, and data uniformity. It outlines all the dilemmas in wordhood decisions that cannot be resolved by linguistic definition alone. The book addresses the analysis and classification of grammatical categories in Chinese. It presents identification of lexical units and classification of parts of Chinese speech, indeed yielded felicitous and robust results and laid a solid foundation for a wide range of application research on the Chinese language. The book shows that English version of the primary sources of this research available, more scholars interested in Chinese linguistics and language sciences will benefit from the meticulous and comprehensive analysis carried out by the Chinese Knowledge Information Processing group more than two decades ago.
