We present an iterative procedure to build a Chinese language model (LM). We segment Chinese text into words based on a word-based Chinese language model. However, the construction of a Chinese LM itself requires word boundaries. To get out of the chicken-and-egg problem, we propose an iterative procedure that alternates two operations: segmenting text into words and building an LM. Starting with an initial segmented corpus and an LM based upon it, we use a Viterbi-liek algorithm to segment another set of data. Then, we build an LM based on the second set and use the resulting LM to.