Onto Word Segmentation of the Complete Tang Poems

We aim at segmenting words in the Complete Tang Poems (CTP). Although it is possible to do some research about CTP without doing full-scale word segmentation, we must move forward to word-level analysis of CTP for conducting advanced research topics. In November 2018 when we submitted the manuscript for DH 2019 (ADHO), we collected only 2433 poems that were segmented by trained experts, and used the segmented poems to evaluate the segmenter that considered domain knowledge of Chinese poetry. We trained pointwise mutual information (PMI) between Chinese characters based on the CTP poems (excluding the 2433 poems, which were used exclusively only for testing) and the domain knowledge. The segmenter relied on the PMI information to the recover 85.7% of words in the test poems. We could segment a poem completely correct only 17.8% of the time, however. When we presented our work at DH 2019, we have annotated more than 20000 poems. With a much larger amount of data, we were able to apply biLSTM models for this word segmentation task, and we segmented a poem completely correct above 20% of the time. In contrast, human annotators completely agreed on their annotations about 40% of the time.Comment: 5 pages, 2 tables, presented at the 2019 International Conference on Digital Humanities (ADHO

BERT Meets Chinese Word Segmentation

Chinese word segmentation (CWS) is a fundamental task for Chinese language understanding. Recently, neural network-based models have attained superior performance in solving the in-domain CWS task. Last year, Bidirectional Encoder Representation from Transformers (BERT), a new language representation model, has been proposed as a backbone model for many natural language tasks and redefined the corresponding performance. The excellent performance of BERT motivates us to apply it to solve the CWS task. By conducting intensive experiments in the benchmark datasets from the second International Chinese Word Segmentation Bake-off, we obtain several keen observations. BERT can slightly improve the performance even when the datasets contain the issue of labeling inconsistency. When applying sufficiently learned features, Softmax, a simpler classifier, can attain the same performance as that of a more complicated classifier, e.g., Conditional Random Field (CRF). The performance of BERT usually increases as the model size increases. The features extracted by BERT can be also applied as good candidates for other neural network models.Comment: 13 pages; 3 figure

Fast Neural Chinese Word Segmentation for Long Sentences

Rapidly developed neural models have achieved competitive performance in Chinese word segmentation (CWS) as their traditional counterparts. However, most of methods encounter the computational inefficiency especially for long sentences because of the increasing model complexity and slower decoders. This paper presents a simple neural segmenter which directly labels the gap existence between adjacent characters to alleviate the existing drawback. Our segmenter is fully end-to-end and capable of performing segmentation very fast. We also show a performance difference with different tag sets. The experiments show that our segmenter can provide comparable performance with state-of-the-art