Chinese is written without using spaces or other word delimiters. Although a text may be thought of as a corresponding sequence of words, there is considerable ambiguity in the placement of boundaries. Interpreting a text as a sequence of words is beneficial for some information retrieval and storage tasks: for example, full-text search, word-based compression, and keyphrase extraction. We describe a scheme that infers appropriate positions for word boundaries using an adaptive language model that is standard in text compression. It is trained on a corpus of presegmented text, and when applied to new text, interpolates word boundaries so as to maximize the compression obtained. This simple and general method performs well with respect to specialized schemes for Chinese language segmentation.

We outline the need for search engines to provide user feedback on the expected time for a query, describe a scheme for learning a model of query time by observing sample queries, and discuss the results obtained for a set of actual user queries on a document collection using the MG search engine.

This paper describes a system that uses visualisation to assist a user in dealing with the information returned from a search engine. The user's queries, and the documents they return, are represented by a 3D spatial structure that shows their relationships and provides a way of accessing and exploring the documents retrieved. It is implemented to work with the New Zealand Digital Library, a set of large document collections that is available over the Web. The visualisation scheme is a Java applet that is updated dynamically whenever the user makes a new search, and can be browsed alongside the search engine.