A Unicode-based Adaptive Segmenter

Abstract

This paper presents a Unicode based Chinese word segmentor. It can handle Chinese text in Simplified, Traditional, or mixed mode. The system uses the strategy of divide-and-conquer to handle the recognition of personal names, numbers, time and numerical values, etc in the preprocessing stage. The segmentor further uses tagging information to work on disambiguation. Adopting a modular design approach, different functional parts are separately implemented using different modules and each module tackles one problem at a time providing more flexibility and extensibility. Results show that with added pre-processing modules and accessorial modules, the accuracy of the segmentor is increased and the system is easily adaptive to different applications.