This article presents a pragmatic approach to Chinese word segmentation. It differs from most previous approaches mainly in three respects. First, while theoretical linguists have defined Chinese words using various linguistic criteria, Chinese words in this study are defined pragmatically as segmentation units whose definition depends on how they are used and processed in realistic computer applications. Second, we propose a pragmatic mathematical framework in which segmenting known words and detecting unknown words of different types (i. e., morphologically derived words, factoids, named entities, and other unlisted words) can be performed simultaneously in a unified way. These tasks are usually conducted separately in other systems. Finally, we do not assume the existence of a universal word segmentation standard that is application-independent. Instead, we argue for the necessity of multiple segmentation standards due to the pragmatic fact that different natural language processing applications might require different granularities of Chinese words.
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