  The Chinese language poses challenges for natural language processing based
on the unit of a word even for formal uses of the Chinese language, social
media only makes word segmentation in Chinese even more difficult. In this
document we propose a pointillism approach to natural language processing.
Rather than words that have individual meanings, the basic unit of a
pointillism approach is trigrams of characters. These grams take on meaning in
aggregate when they appear together in a way that is correlated over time.
  Our results from three kinds of experiments show that when words and topics
do have a meme-like trend, they can be reconstructed from only trigrams. For
example, for 4-character idioms that appear at least 99 times in one day in our
data, the unconstrained precision (that is, precision that allows for deviation
from a lexicon when the result is just as correct as the lexicon version of the
word or phrase) is 0.93. For longer words and phrases collected from
Wiktionary, including neologisms, the unconstrained precision is 0.87. We
consider these results to be very promising, because they suggest that it is
feasible for a machine to reconstruct complex idioms, phrases, and neologisms
with good precision without any notion of words. Thus the colorful and baroque
uses of language that typify social media in challenging languages such as
Chinese may in fact be accessible to machines.
