A method is disclosed for providing a chunking utility that supports robust natural language processing. A corpus is chunked in accordance with a draft chunking specification. Chunk inconsistencies in the corpus are automatically flagged for resolution, and a chunking utility is provided in which at least some of the flagged inconsistencies are resolved. The chunking utility provides a single, consistent global chunking standard, ensuring compatibility among various applications. The chunking utility is particularly advantageous for non-alphabetic languages, such as Chinese.