A new method for Chinese word segmentation named Conditional F&BMM (Forward and Backward Maximal Matching) \vhich incorporates both bigram statistics (ie., mutual infonnation and difference of t-test between Chinese characters) and linguistic rules for ambiguity resolution is proposed in this paper The key characteristics of this model are the use of: (i) statistics which can be automatically derived from any raw corpus, (ii) a rule base for disambiguation with consistency and controlled size to be built up in a systematic way.