Universal Word Segmentation: Implementation and Interpretation

Yan Shao, Christian Hardmeier, Joakim Nivre


Abstract
Word segmentation is a low-level NLP task that is non-trivial for a considerable number of languages. In this paper, we present a sequence tagging framework and apply it to word segmentation for a wide range of languages with different writing systems and typological characteristics. Additionally, we investigate the correlations between various typological factors and word segmentation accuracy. The experimental results indicate that segmentation accuracy is positively related to word boundary markers and negatively to the number of unique non-segmental terms. Based on the analysis, we design a small set of language-specific settings and extensively evaluate the segmentation system on the Universal Dependencies datasets. Our model obtains state-of-the-art accuracies on all the UD languages. It performs substantially better on languages that are non-trivial to segment, such as Chinese, Japanese, Arabic and Hebrew, when compared to previous work.
Anthology ID:
Q18-1030
Original:
Q18-1030v1
Version 2:
Q18-1030v2
Volume:
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 6
Month:
Year:
2018
Address:
Cambridge, MA
Editors:
Lillian Lee, Mark Johnson, Kristina Toutanova, Brian Roark
Venue:
TACL
SIG:
Publisher:
MIT Press
Note:
Pages:
421–435
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/Q18-1030
DOI:
10.1162/tacl_a_00033
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yan Shao, Christian Hardmeier, and Joakim Nivre. 2018. Universal Word Segmentation: Implementation and Interpretation. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 6:421–435.
Cite (Informal):
Universal Word Segmentation: Implementation and Interpretation (Shao et al., TACL 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/Q18-1030.pdf
Code
 yanshao9798/segmenter
Data
Universal Dependencies