Reduce Meaningless Words for Joint Chinese Word Segmentation and Part-of-speech Tagging

Abstract: Conventional statistics-based methods for joint Chinese word segmentation and part-of-speech tagging (S&T) have generalization ability to recognize new words that do not appear in the training data. An undesirable side effect is that a number of meaningless words will be incorrectly created. We propose an effective and efficient framework for S&T that introduces features to significantly reduce meaningless words generation. A general lexicon, Wikepedia and a large-scale raw corpus of 200 billion characters are used to generate word-based features for the wordhood. The word-lattice based framework consists of a character-based model and a word-based model in order to employ our word-based features. Experiments on Penn Chinese treebank 5 show that this method has a 62.9% reduction of meaningless word generation in comparison with the baseline. As a result, the F1 measure for segmentation is increased to 0.984.