Improving Chinese Word Segmentation with Wordhood Memory Networks

Yuanhe Tian, Yan Song, Fei Xia, Tong Zhang, Yonggang Wang


Abstract
Contextual features always play an important role in Chinese word segmentation (CWS). Wordhood information, being one of the contextual features, is proved to be useful in many conventional character-based segmenters. However, this feature receives less attention in recent neural models and it is also challenging to design a framework that can properly integrate wordhood information from different wordhood measures to existing neural frameworks. In this paper, we therefore propose a neural framework, WMSeg, which uses memory networks to incorporate wordhood information with several popular encoder-decoder combinations for CWS. Experimental results on five benchmark datasets indicate the memory mechanism successfully models wordhood information for neural segmenters and helps WMSeg achieve state-of-the-art performance on all those datasets. Further experiments and analyses also demonstrate the robustness of our proposed framework with respect to different wordhood measures and the efficiency of wordhood information in cross-domain experiments.
Anthology ID:
2020.acl-main.734
Original:
2020.acl-main.734v1
Version 2:
2020.acl-main.734v2
Volume:
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Dan Jurafsky, Joyce Chai, Natalie Schluter, Joel Tetreault
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
8274–8285
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.734
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.734
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yuanhe Tian, Yan Song, Fei Xia, Tong Zhang, and Yonggang Wang. 2020. Improving Chinese Word Segmentation with Wordhood Memory Networks. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 8274–8285, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Improving Chinese Word Segmentation with Wordhood Memory Networks (Tian et al., ACL 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.734.pdf
Video:
 http://slideslive.com/38928921
Code
 SVAIGBA/WMSeg