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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 analyse transaction logs for a large full-text document collection for Computer Science researchers. We report insights gained from this analysis and identify resulting search interface design issues.

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Digital libraries of music have the potential to capture popular imagination in ways that more scholarly libraries cannot. We are working towards a comprehensive digital library of musical material, including popular music. We have developed new ways of collecting musical material, accessing it through searching and browsing, and presenting the results to the user. We work with different representations of music: facsimile images of scores, the internal representation of a music editing program, page images typeset by a music editor, MIDI files, audio files representing sung user input, and textual metadata such as title, composer and arranger, and lyrics. This paper describes a comprehensive suite of tools that we have built for this project. These tools gather musical material, convert between many of these representations, allow searching based on combined musical and textual criteria, and help present the results of searching and browsing. Although we do not yet have a single fully-blown digital music library, we have built several exploratory prototype collections of music, some of them very large (100,000 tunes), and critical components of the system have been evaluated.