This paper proposes a segmentation standard for Chinese natural language
processing. The standard is proposed to achieve linguistic felicity, computational feasibility, and data uniformity. Linguistic felicity is maintained by a definition of segmentation unit that is equivalent to the theoretical definition of word, as well as a set of segmentation principles that are equivalent to a functional definition of a word.
Computational feasibility is ensured by the fact that the above functional definitions are procedural in nature and can be converted to segmentation algorithms as well as by the implementable heuristic guidelines which deal with specific linguistic categories. Data uniformity is achieved by stratification of the standard itself and by defining a standard lexicon as part of the standard.