Bulletin Spring‧Summer 1998

Prof. W.S. Wong Receives Hong Kong Award for Industry for Jasmine & ANSeRS Jasmine & ANSeRS, a software platfor m for automated Chinese text analysis w i t h a search engine for Chinese Internet/Intranet applications , developed by Prof. Wong Wing- shing (left), professor of information engineering, an d Ph.D. graduate Dr. Qi n A n (right), was awarded the Certificate of Merit in Consumer Produc t Design in the 1997 Hong Kong Awards for Industry organized by the Federation of Hong Kong Industries. Jasmine, the Chinese wo rd processing system, features the functions of automated segmentation and part-of-speech-tagging needed for advanced text processing. Usin g a hybrid approach, it combines the learning ability of neural networks w i th the efficiency of table look-up. Th e system has a lexicon w i th 180,000 words w i th segmen- tation accuracy of 99.76 per cent. It also has a wide range of applications including automatic Chinese document classification and i n f o r ma t i o n filtering, text-to-voic e translation, accurate translation between simplified and traditional characters, as wel l as intelligent Chinese text editor w i th functions like 'spel l checking'. Jasmine & ANSeRS, the associative network searching robot system for Chinese database usin g Jasmine, meets the needs of the growing number of Internet users who use Chinese. The system queries w i th Chinese word s or sentences and uses topics rather than exact matches as search keys. Hence, wo rd segmentation is not required for input. To date, the system has searched more than 500,000 Internet web pages in Chinese and is continuously building the database of Chinese web pages. ANSeRS is also the first and only topical search engine that can read GB web pages and Big5 web pages i n one browser. H o w does Prof. Wong feel about the publi c recognition for his brainchild? 'I feel happy to be able to turn my research findings into practical ways to help people. Some Internet companies have already expressed interest i n the system. I t is currently used by Goyoyo, a public Chinese searching engine company.' The University has also successfully licensed the new product to companies in Hong Kong, Europe, an d the USA recently. Chinese University Bulletin Spring • Summer 1998 36