This paper describes a classifier that assigns semantic thesaurus categories to unknown Chinese words (words not already in the CiLin thesaurus and the Chinese Electronic Dictionary, but in the Sinica Corpus). The focus of the paper differs in two ways from previous research in this particular area. Prior research in Chinese unknown words mostly focused on proper nouns (Lee 1993, Lee, Lee and Chen 1994, Huang, Hong and Chen 1994, Chen and Chen 2000). This paper does not address proper nouns, focusing rather on common nouns, adjectives, and verbs. .
