Skip to main content

Neural Chinese Word Segmentation as Sequence to Sequence Translation

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Social Media Processing (SMP 2017)

Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 774))

Included in the following conference series:

Abstract

Recently, Chinese word segmentation (CWS) methods using neural networks have made impressive progress. Most of them regard the CWS as a sequence labeling problem which construct models based on local features rather than considering global information of input sequence. In this paper, we cast the CWS as a sequence translation problem and propose a novel sequence-to-sequence CWS model with an attention-based encoder-decoder framework. The model captures the global information from the input and directly outputs the segmented sequence. It can also tackle other NLP tasks with CWS jointly in an end-to-end mode. Experiments on Weibo, PKU and MSRA benchmark datasets show that our approach has achieved competitive performances compared with state-of-the-art methods. Meanwhile, we successfully applied our proposed model to jointly learning CWS and Chinese spelling correction, which demonstrates its applicability of multi-task fusion.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    Executable source code is available at https://github.com/SourcecodeSharing/CWSpostediting.

  2. 2.

    All data and the program are available at https://github.com/FudanNLP/NLPCC-WordSeg-Weibo.

  3. 3.

    http://www.weibo.com.

  4. 4.

    All data and the program are available at http://sighan.cs.uchicago.edu/bakeoff2005/.

  5. 5.

    Implementations are available at https://github.com/lisa-groundhog/GroundHog.

  6. 6.

    Available online at https://github.com/HIT-SCIR/ltp.

References

  1. Bahdanau, D., Cho, K., Bengio, Y.: Neural machine translation by jointly learning to align and translate. arXiv preprint arXiv:1409.0473 (2014)

  2. Cai, D., Zhao, H.: Neural word segmentation learning for Chinese. arXiv preprint arXiv:1606.04300 (2016)

  3. Che, W., Li, Z., Liu, T.: LTP: a Chinese language technology platform. In: Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Demonstrations, pp. 13–16. Association for Computational Linguistics (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Chen, X., Qiu, X., Zhu, C., Huang, X.: Gated recursive neural network for Chinese word segmentation. In: ACL, vol. 1, pp. 1744–1753 (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Chen, X., Qiu, X., Zhu, C., Liu, P., Huang, X.: Long short-term memory neural networks for Chinese word segmentation. In: EMNLP, pp. 1197–1206 (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Cho, K., Van Merriënboer, B., Gulcehre, C., Bahdanau, D., Bougares, F., Schwenk, H., Bengio, Y.: Learning phrase representations using RNN encoder-decoder for statistical machine translation. arXiv preprint arXiv:1406.1078 (2014)

  7. Collobert, R., Weston, J., Bottou, L., Karlen, M., Kavukcuoglu, K., Kuksa, P.: Natural language processing (almost) from scratch. J. Mach. Learn. Res. 12, 2493–2537 (2011)

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  8. Emerson, T.: The second international Chinese word segmentation bakeoff. In: Proceedings of the Fourth SIGHAN Workshop on Chinese Language Processing, vol. 133 (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Gehring, J., Auli, M., Grangier, D., Yarats, D., Dauphin, Y.N.: Convolutional sequence to sequence learning. ArXiv e-prints, May 2017

    Google Scholar 

  10. Koehn, P., Hoang, H., Birch, A., Callison-Burch, C., Federico, M., Bertoldi, N., Cowan, B., Shen, W., Moran, C., Zens, R., et al.: Moses: open source toolkit for statistical machine translation. In: Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the ACL on Interactive Poster and Demonstration Sessions, pp. 177–180. Association for Computational Linguistics (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Lafferty, J., McCallum, A., Pereira, F., et al.: Conditional random fields: probabilistic models for segmenting and labeling sequence data. In: Proceedings of the Eighteenth International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML, vol. 1, pp. 282–289 (2001)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Lin, C.Y., Och, F.J.: Automatic evaluation of machine translation quality using longest common subsequence and skip-bigram statistics. In: Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics, p. 605. Association for Computational Linguistics (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Pei, W., Ge, T., Chang, B.: Max-margin tensor neural network for Chinese word segmentation. In: ACL, vol. 1, pp. 293–303 (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Peng, F., Feng, F., McCallum, A.: Chinese segmentation and new word detection using conditional random fields. In: Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Computational Linguistics. p. 562. Association for Computational Linguistics (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Qiu, P., Qiu, X., Huang, X.: A new psychometric-inspired evaluation metric for Chinese word segmentation. In: Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 2185–2194 (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Qiu, X., Qian, P., Shi, Z.: Overview of the NLPCC-ICCPOL 2016 shared task: Chinese word segmentation for micro-blog texts. In: Lin, C.-Y., Xue, N., Zhao, D., Huang, X., Feng, Y. (eds.) ICCPOL/NLPCC-2016. LNCS, vol. 10102, pp. 901–906. Springer, Cham (2016). doi:10.1007/978-3-319-50496-4_84

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  17. Srivastava, N., Hinton, G.E., Krizhevsky, A., Sutskever, I., Salakhutdinov, R.: Dropout: a simple way to prevent neural networks from overfitting. J. Mach. Learn. Res. 15(1), 1929–1958 (2014)

    MATH  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  18. Sun, X., Li, W., Wang, H., Lu, Q.: Feature-frequency-adaptive on-line training for fast and accurate natural language processing. Comput. Linguist. 40(3), 563–586 (2014)

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  19. Sutskever, I., Vinyals, O., Le, Q.V.: Sequence to sequence learning with neural networks. In: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, pp. 3104–3112 (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  20. Wu, Y., Schuster, M., Chen, Z., Le, Q.V., Norouzi, M., Macherey, W., Krikun, M., Cao, Y., Gao, Q., Macherey, K., et al.: Google’s neural machine translation system: bridging the gap between human and machine translation. arXiv preprint arXiv:1609.08144 (2016)

  21. Xue, N., Shen, L.: Chinese word segmentation as LMR tagging. In: Proceedings of the Second SIGHAN Workshop on Chinese Language Processing, vol. 17, pp. 176–179 (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  22. Yu, L.C., Lee, L.H., Tseng, Y.H., Chen, H.H., et al.: Overview of SIGHAN 2014 bake-off for Chinese spelling check. In: Proceedings of the 3rd CIPSSIGHAN Joint Conference on Chinese Language Processing (CLP 2014), pp. 126–132 (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  23. Zhang, L., Wang, H., Sun, X., Mansur, M.: Exploring representations from unlabeled data with co-training for Chinese word segmentation In: Proceedings of the 2013 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pp. 311–321 (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  24. Zhao, H., Huang, C.N., Li, M., Lu, B.L.: A unified character-based tagging framework for chinese word segmentation. ACM Trans. Asian Lang. Inf. Process. (TALIP) 9(2), 5 (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  25. Zheng, X., Chen, H., Xu, T.: Deep learning for Chinese word segmentation and pos tagging. In: EMNLP, pp. 647–657 (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  26. Ziemski, M., Junczys-Dowmunt, M., Pouliquen, B.: The united nations parallel corpus v1.0. In: Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC, pp. 23–28 (2016)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Basic Research Program (973) of China (No. 2013CB329303) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61132009).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ping Jian .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2017 Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

About this paper

Cite this paper

Shi, X., Huang, H., Jian, P., Guo, Y., Wei, X., Tang, YK. (2017). Neural Chinese Word Segmentation as Sequence to Sequence Translation. In: Cheng, X., Ma, W., Liu, H., Shen, H., Feng, S., Xie, X. (eds) Social Media Processing. SMP 2017. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 774. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-6805-8_8

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-6805-8_8

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore

  • Print ISBN: 978-981-10-6804-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-981-10-6805-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics