Having a general characterbased approach that works well across languages could be useful, for example, in a streamlined intelligence application that is required to work efficiently on a wide range of languages for which NLP tools or language experts might not be readily available, or where the user does not desire a complex customization for each language.
kernels based on a different kind of information (for example, syntactic and semantic information) can be combined with string kernels via MKL to improve accuracy in some specific situations.