This paper presents a novel hybrid generative/discriminative model of word segmentation based on nonparametric Bayesian methods. Unlike ordinary discriminative word segmentation which relies only on labeled data, our semi-supervised model also leverages a huge amounts of unlabeled text to automatically learn new “words”, and further constrains them by using a labeled data to segment non-standard texts such as those found in social networking services.

Specifically, our hybrid model combines a discriminative classifier (CRF; Lafferty et al. (2001) and unsupervised word segmentation (NPYLM; Mochihashi et al. (2009)), with a transparent exchange of information between these two model structures within the semi-supervised framework (JESS-CM; Suzuki and Isozaki (2008)). We confirmed that it can appropriately segment non-standard texts like those in Twitter and Weibo and has nearly state-of-the-art accuracy on standard datasets in Japanese, Chinese, and Thai.

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©2017 Association for Computational Linguistics. Distributed under a CC-BY 4.0 license.
2017
Association for Computational Linguistics
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