A Hybrid Approach to Word Segmentation of Vietnamese Texts

The original publication is available at www.springerlink.comInternational audienceWe present in this article a hybrid approach to automatically tokenize Vietnamese text. The approach combines both finite-state automata technique, regular expression parsing and the maximal-matching strategy which is augmented by statistical methods to resolve ambiguities of segmentation. The Vietnamese lexicon in use is compactly represented by a minimal finite-state automaton. A text to be tokenized is first parsed into lexical phrases and other patterns using pre-defined regular expressions. The automaton is then deployed to build linear graphs corresponding to the phrases to be segmented. The application of a maximal- matching strategy on a graph results in all candidate segmentations of a phrase. It is the responsibility of an ambiguity resolver, which uses a smoothed bigram language model, to choose the most probable segmentation of the phrase. The hybrid approach is implemented to create vnTokenizer, a highly accurate tokenizer for Vietnamese texts

A Factoid Question Answering System for Vietnamese

In this paper, we describe the development of an end-to-end factoid question answering system for the Vietnamese language. This system combines both statistical models and ontology-based methods in a chain of processing modules to provide high-quality mappings from natural language text to entities. We present the challenges in the development of such an intelligent user interface for an isolating language like Vietnamese and show that techniques developed for inflectional languages cannot be applied "as is". Our question answering system can answer a wide range of general knowledge questions with promising accuracy on a test set.Comment: In the proceedings of the HQA'18 workshop, The Web Conference Companion, Lyon, Franc