Fast and Accurate Neural Word Segmentation for Chinese

Neural models with minimal feature engineering have achieved competitive performance against traditional methods for the task of Chinese word segmentation. However, both training and working procedures of the current neural models are computationally inefficient. This paper presents a greedy neural word segmenter with balanced word and character embedding inputs to alleviate the existing drawbacks. Our segmenter is truly end-to-end, capable of performing segmentation much faster and even more accurate than state-of-the-art neural models on Chinese benchmark datasets.Comment: To appear in ACL201

Neural Word Segmentation with Rich Pretraining

Neural word segmentation research has benefited from large-scale raw texts by leveraging them for pretraining character and word embeddings. On the other hand, statistical segmentation research has exploited richer sources of external information, such as punctuation, automatic segmentation and POS. We investigate the effectiveness of a range of external training sources for neural word segmentation by building a modular segmentation model, pretraining the most important submodule using rich external sources. Results show that such pretraining significantly improves the model, leading to accuracies competitive to the best methods on six benchmarks.Comment: Accepted by ACL 201

Natural Language Processing with Small Feed-Forward Networks

We show that small and shallow feed-forward neural networks can achieve near state-of-the-art results on a range of unstructured and structured language processing tasks while being considerably cheaper in memory and computational requirements than deep recurrent models. Motivated by resource-constrained environments like mobile phones, we showcase simple techniques for obtaining such small neural network models, and investigate different tradeoffs when deciding how to allocate a small memory budget.Comment: EMNLP 2017 short pape