Noun extraction is very important for many NLP applications such as information retrieval, automatic text classification, and information extraction. Most of the previous Korean noun extraction systems use a morphological analyzer or a Partof-Speech (POS) tagger. Therefore, they require much of the linguistic knowledge such as morpheme dictionaries and rules (e.g. morphosyntactic rules and morphological rules). This paper proposes a new noun extraction method that uses the syllable based word recognition model. It finds the most probable syllable-tag sequence of the input sentence by using automatically acquired statistical information from the POS tagged corpus and extracts nouns by detecting word boundaries. Furthermore, it does not require any labor for constructing and maintaining linguistic knowledge. We have performed various experiments with a wide range of variables influencing the performance. The experimental results show that without morphological analysis or POS tagging...