On Chinese Language Processing

No matter how Chinese language processing (CLP) is investigated, Chinese grammar checker has been the bottleneck of all the components and phases of CLP: from character coding, word indexing, text segmenting,... all the way to machine translating and interpreting. The more investigators study the Chinese language, the more they realize the importance of meaning-constraints in the language. The new trend seems to focus on finding rules and patterns through statistics drawn from large corpuses. Above all the recognized syntactic and semantic rules or patterns, as well as theories, there seem to be some cognitive and psychological constraints that go beyond the understanding of traditional Chinese grammar, and that may become the last fortress to be conquered in CLP.