We discuss the use of probability‐based natural language processing for Chinese text retrieval. We focus on comparing different text extraction methods and probabilistic weighting methods. Several document processing methods and probabilistic weighting functions are presented. A number of experiments have been conducted on large standard text collections. We present the experimental results that compare a word‐based text processing method with a character‐based method. The experimental results also compare a number of term‐weighting functions including both single‐unit weighting and compound‐unit weighting functions.