Span Labeling Approach for Vietnamese and Chinese Word Segmentation
This addresses word segmentation for Vietnamese and Chinese languages, offering incremental improvements over existing methods.
The paper tackles Vietnamese and Chinese word segmentation by proposing a span labeling approach called SPAN SEG, which achieves a state-of-the-art F-score of 98.31% on the Vietnamese treebank benchmark and competitive or higher F-scores on five Chinese benchmarks with faster inference time.
In this paper, we propose a span labeling approach to model n-gram information for Vietnamese word segmentation, namely SPAN SEG. We compare the span labeling approach with the conditional random field by using encoders with the same architecture. Since Vietnamese and Chinese have similar linguistic phenomena, we evaluated the proposed method on the Vietnamese treebank benchmark dataset and five Chinese benchmark datasets. Through our experimental results, the proposed approach SpanSeg achieves higher performance than the sequence tagging approach with the state-of-the-art F-score of 98.31% on the Vietnamese treebank benchmark, when they both apply the contextual pre-trained language model XLM-RoBERTa and the predicted word boundary information. Besides, we do fine-tuning experiments for the span labeling approach on BERT and ZEN pre-trained language model for Chinese with fewer parameters, faster inference time, and competitive or higher F-scores than the previous state-of-the-art approach, word segmentation with word-hood memory networks, on five Chinese benchmarks.