1. Segment Only: In the option, the program will add spaces between the word units in the text. No other information is added.
2. Add Dictionary Entries at status line: After segmenting the text, the program adds two kinds of ways of looking up the word. First, when the user puts the mouse over an underlined word, its pronounciation and definition will appear at the bottom of the browser, at the status line. If the user actually clicks on the underlined word, it will take them to the pronounciation and English definition as a footnote later on in the page.
3. Add Dictionary Entries as footnotes: This option is for users with older browsers that do not understand JavaScript. Holding the mouse over a word will do nothing, but clicking it on will still take the user to the definition in the footnotes. The file size is also smaller than option 2.
4. Convert to Pinyin: The program segments the text and uses that information to convert the Chinese characters to pinyin. Only the pinyin is shown in the results.

Click here for an already annotated sample text.

The tool currently only handles GB-encoded text. Dictionary definitions are drawn from Paul Denisowski's CEDICT Chinese-English dictionary. If you find a word that does not have a definition, consider contributing it to the CEDICT project. The segmentation algorithm is still under development. Just what constitutes a "proper" Chinese word is also a good research topic. I will include my own guidelines at a later date. You can download the segmenter code (in perl) and run it yourself. You can also look up entries in CEDICT from my Chinese-English dictionary page.

Please visit my guestbook to tell me you comments and suggestions for this tool. If you came to this page directly, you might also enjoy visiting some of my other On-line Chinese Tools.