Papers › Incorporating Word Attention into Character-Based Word Segmentation

Incorporating Word Attention into Character-Based Word Segmentation

1 Jun 2019NAACL 2019 6archive 2025-07-28

Shohei Higashiyama, Masao Utiyama, Eiichiro Sumita, Masao Ideuchi, Yoshiaki Oida, Yohei Sakamoto, Isaac Okada

Neural network models have been actively applied to word segmentation, especially Chinese, because of the ability to minimize the effort in feature engineering. Typical segmentation models are categorized as character-based, for conducting exact inference, or word-based, for utilizing word-level information. We propose a character-based model utilizing word information to leverage the advantages of both types of models. Our model learns the importance of multiple candidate words for a character on the basis of an attention mechanism, and makes use of it for segmentation decisions. The experimental results show that our model achieves better performance than the state-of-the-art models on both Japanese and Chinese benchmark datasets.

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Feature EngineeringJapanese Word SegmentationSegmentation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Japanese Word Segmentation BCCWJ Word Attention F1-score (Word) 0.9893 #2 of 3 Archive leaderboard report

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