Parsing Through Boundaries in Chinese Word Segmentation
Abstract
Chinese word segmentation is a foundational task in natural language processing (NLP), with far-reaching effects on syntactic analysis. Unlike alphabetic languages like English, Chinese lacks explicit word boundaries, making segmentation both necessary and inherently ambiguous. This study highlights the intricate relationship between word segmentation and syntactic parsing, providing a clearer understanding of how different segmentation strategies shape dependency structures in Chinese. Focusing on the Chinese GSD treebank, we analyze multiple word boundary schemes, each reflecting distinct linguistic and computational assumptions, and examine how they influence the resulting syntactic structures. To support detailed comparison, we introduce an interactive web-based visualization tool that displays parsing outcomes across segmentation methods.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2503.23091,
title = {Parsing Through Boundaries in Chinese Word Segmentation},
author = {Yige Chen and Zelong Li and Cindy Zhang and Changbing Yang and Amandisa Cady and Ai Ka Lee and Zejiao Zeng and Eunkyul Leah Jo and Haihua Pan and Jungyeul Park},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.23091},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
Submitted to EMNLP2025 System Demonstration