1. A method in a computer system for identifying individual words occurring in a sentence of Chinese text, the method comprising the steps of: for each of a plurality of textual characters: storing an indication of the characters that occur in the second position of words that begin with the character; and storing an indication of the positions in which the character occurs in words; for each of a plurality of contiguous groups of characters occurring in the sentence: determining whether the character occurring in the second position of the group is indicated to occur in words that begin with the character occurring in the first position of the group; if it is determined that the character occurring in the second position of the group is indicated to occur in words that begin with the character occurring in the first position of the group, determining whether every character of the group is indicated to occur in words in the position in which it occurs in the group; if it is determined that every character of the group is indicated to occur in words in the position in which it occurs in the group, comparing the group of characters to a list of words used in the Chinese language to determine whether the group of characters is a word used in the Chinese language; submitting the groups of characters determined to be words used in the Chinese language to a syntactic parser; receiving from the syntactic parser a parse structure identifying the syntactic structure of the sentence, the parse structure specifying a subset of the submitted groups of characters as being part of the syntactic structure of the sentence; and identifying the groups of characters specified by the parse structure as words occurring in the sentence.