A Novel Chinese Text Subject Extraction Method Based on Character Co-occurrence

Subject extraction is one of the fundamental works of natural language processing. Word segmentation or word extraction is always the first step of subject extraction. As there is no intervals among words in Chinese text, both word segmentation and word extraction are difficult. In this paper, a novel Chinese text subject extraction method based on character co-occurrence is put forward. Neither word segmentation nor word extraction is required in this method. The method has high processing speed and can be used in both subject sentence extraction and subject paragraph extraction. Another advantage of this approach is that it can be used to process not only Chinese text but also text in other languages and even multi-language text. Results of experiments show that the approach gains high accuracy of 77.19% in multi-style text of news. And without word segmentation, the accuracy does not decline.