Chinese Word Segmentation by Classification of Characters

During the process of Chinese word segmentation, two main problems occur: segmentation ambiguities and unknown word occurrences. This paper describes a method to solve the segmentation problem. First, we use a dictionary-based approach to segment the text. We apply the Maximum Matching algorithm to segment the text forwards (FMM) and backwards (BMM). Based on the difference between FMM and BMM, and the context, we apply a classification method based on Support Vector Machines to re-assign the word boundaries. In so doing, we use the output of a dictionary-based approach, and then apply a machine-learning-based approach to solve the segmentation problem. Experimental results show that our model can achieve an F-measure of 99.0 for overall segmentation, given the condition that there are no unknown words in the text, and an F-measure of 95.1 if unknown words exist.