Mining Word Boundaries from Speech-Text Parallel Data for Cross-domain Chinese Word Segmentation

Xuebin Wang, Lei Zhang, Zhenghua Li, Shilin Zhou, Chen Gong, Yang Hou


Abstract
Inspired by early research on exploring naturally annotated data for Chinese Word Segmentation (CWS), and also by recent research on integration of speech and text processing, this work for the first time proposes to explicitly mine word boundaries from parallel speech-text data. We employ the Montreal Forced Aligner (MFA) toolkit to perform character-level alignment on speech-text data, giving pauses as candidate word boundaries. Based on detailed analysis of collected pauses, we propose an effective probability-based strategy for filtering unreliable word boundaries. To more effectively utilize word boundaries as extra training data, we also propose a robust complete-then-train (CTT) strategy. We conduct cross-domain CWS experiments on two target domains, i.e., ZX and AISHELL2. We have annotated about 1K sentences as the evaluation data of AISHELL2. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.83
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1247–1257
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.83/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xuebin Wang, Lei Zhang, Zhenghua Li, Shilin Zhou, Chen Gong, and Yang Hou. 2025. Mining Word Boundaries from Speech-Text Parallel Data for Cross-domain Chinese Word Segmentation. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 1247–1257, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Mining Word Boundaries from Speech-Text Parallel Data for Cross-domain Chinese Word Segmentation (Wang et al., COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.83.pdf