Segmenting a chunk of text into words is usually the first step of processing Chinese text, but its necessity has rarely been explored. In this paper, we ask the fundamental question of whether Chinese word segmentation (CWS) is necessary for deep learning-based Chinese Natural Language Processing. We benchmark neural word-based models which rely on word segmentation against neural char-based models which do not involve word segmentation in four end-to-end NLP benchmark tasks: language modeling, machine translation, sentence matching paraphrase and text classification. Through direct comparisons between these two types of models, we find that char-based models consistently outperform word-based models. Based on these observations, we conduct comprehensive experiments to study why word-based models underperform char-based models in these deep learning-based NLP tasks. We show that it is because word-based models are more vulnerable to data sparsity and the presence of out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words, and thus more prone to overfitting. We hope this paper could encourage researchers in the community to rethink the necessity of word segmentation in deep learning-based Chinese Natural Language Processing. Yuxian Meng and Xiaoya Li contributed equally to this paper.
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@cite_4: Recurrent neural network (RNN) has been broadly applied to natural language process (NLP) problems. This kind of neural network is designed for modeling sequential data and has been testified to be quite efficient in sequential tagging tasks. In this paper, we propose to use bi-directional RNN with long short-term memory (LSTM) units for Chinese word segmentation, which is a crucial task for modeling Chinese sentences and articles. Classical methods focus on designing and combining hand-craft features from context, whereas bi-directional LSTM network (BLSTM) does not need any prior knowledge or pre-designing, and is expert in creating hierarchical feature representation of contextual information from both directions. Experiment result shows that our approach gets state-of-the-art performance in word segmentation on both traditional Chinese datasets and simplified Chinese datasets.
@cite_36: Recently, neural network models for natural language processing tasks have been increasingly focused on for their ability of alleviating the burden of manual feature engineering. However, the previous neural models cannot extract the complicated feature compositions as the traditional methods with discrete features. In this paper, we propose a gated recursive neural network (GRNN) for Chinese word segmentation, which contains reset and update gates to incorporate the complicated combinations of the context characters. Since GRNN is relative deep, we also use a supervised layer-wise training method to avoid the problem of gradient diffusion. Experiments on the benchmark datasets show that our model outperforms the previous neural network models as well as the state-of-the-art methods.
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@cite_29: Currently most of state-of-the-art methods for Chinese word segmentation are based on supervised learning, whose features aremostly extracted from a local context. Thesemethods cannot utilize the long distance information which is also crucial for word segmentation. In this paper, we propose a novel neural network model for Chinese word segmentation, which adopts the long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network to keep the previous important information inmemory cell and avoids the limit of window size of local context. Experiments on PKU, MSRA and CTB6 benchmark datasets show that our model outperforms the previous neural network models and state-of-the-art methods.
@cite_1: We trained a large, deep convolutional neural network to classify the 1.2 million high-resolution images in the ImageNet LSVRC-2010 contest into the 1000 different classes. On the test data, we achieved top-1 and top-5 error rates of 37.5 and 17.0 which is considerably better than the previous state-of-the-art. The neural network, which has 60 million parameters and 650,000 neurons, consists of five convolutional layers, some of which are followed by max-pooling layers, and three fully-connected layers with a final 1000-way softmax. To make training faster, we used non-saturating neurons and a very efficient GPU implementation of the convolution operation. To reduce overriding in the fully-connected layers we employed a recently-developed regularization method called "dropout" that proved to be very effective. We also entered a variant of this model in the ILSVRC-2012 competition and achieved a winning top-5 test error rate of 15.3 , compared to 26.2 achieved by the second-best entry.
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@cite_13: We report on a series of experiments with convolutional neural networks (CNN) trained on top of pre-trained word vectors for sentence-level classification tasks. We show that a simple CNN with little hyperparameter tuning and static vectors achieves excellent results on multiple benchmarks. Learning task-specific vectors through fine-tuning offers further gains in performance. We additionally propose a simple modification to the architecture to allow for the use of both task-specific and static vectors. The CNN models discussed herein improve upon the state of the art on 4 out of 7 tasks, which include sentiment analysis and question classification.
Neural CWS Models such as RNNs, LSTMs @cite_9 and CNNs @cite_1 @cite_13 not only provide a more flexible way to incorporate context semantics into tagging models but also relieve researchers from the massive work of feature engineering. Neural models for the CWS task have become very popular these years @cite_29 @cite_36 @cite_45 @cite_4 @cite_5 @cite_38 @cite_16 @cite_24 @cite_32 @cite_6 . Neural representations can be used either as a set of CRF features or as input to the decision layer.