A parser is provided that parses a Chinese text stream at the character level and builds a syntactic structure of Chinese character sequences. A character-based syntactic parse tree contains word boundaries, part-of-speech tags, and phrasal structure information. Syntactic knowledge constrains the system when it determines word boundaries. A deterministic procedure is used to convert word-based parse trees into character-based trees. Character-level tags are derived from word-level part-of-speech tags and word-boundary information is encoded with a positional tag. Word-level parts-of-speech become a constituent label in character-based trees. A maximum entropy parser is then built and tested.