SearchinginChineseTheExperienceofHKLII.PDFVIP

Searching in Chinese: the Experience of HKLII * * ° ° Alex Y.H. Fung , Kevin K. H. Pun , Philip Chung , Andrew Mowbray * Department of Computer Science, The University of Hong Kong º Faculty of Law, University of Technology, Sydney Abstract. The Hong Kong Legal Information Institute (HKLII) provides the general public, free of charge, online legal information relating to Hong Kong. A unique feature of the Hong Kong legal system is its bilingual nature (English and Chinese). Hong Kong has a bilingual court system and bilingual statutory laws of equal legal status. Thus to serve the Hong Kong community, HKLII must be able to search and process documents in English and Chinese. Searching in English has not been a difficult problem for HKLII. However, because of the inherent difficulty of recognising word boundaries in Chinese documents, searching in Chinese has been a major challenge for HKLII throughout its development. After trying different methods to improve Chinese searching in HKLII, we have recently got satisfactory results using a new version of the Sino search engine. This paper describes and summarises the experience of HKLII in this regard. Keywords: HKLII, Chinese Search, bilingual 1. Introduction 1.1. HKLII Hong Kong Legal Information Institute (HKLII) 1 is a project of the Law and Technology Centre 2 , a centre jointly established by the Department of Computer Science 3 and the Faculty of Law of The University of Hong Kong (HKU). As a member of the World Legal 4 Information Institute (WorldLII) , HKLII has been greatly assisted by the Australasian Legal Information