Word Segmentation Standard in Chinese, Japanese and Korean

Word segmentation is a process to divide a sentence into meaningful units called "word unit" [ISO/DIS 24614-1]. What is a word unit is judged by principles for its internal integrity and external use constraints. A word unit's internal structure is bound by principles of lexical integrity, unpredictability and so on in order to represent one syntactically meaningful unit. Principles for external use include language economy and frequency such that word units could be registered in a lexicon or any other storage for practical reduction of processing complexity for the further syntactic processing after word segmentation. Such principles for word segmentation are applied for Chinese, Japanese and Korean, and impacts of the standard are discussed.