An Empirical Study of Chinese Chunking

In this paper, we describe an empirical study of Chinese chunking on a corpus, which is extracted from UPENN Chinese Treebank-4 (CTB4). First, we compare the performance of the state-of-the-art machine learning models. Then we propose two approaches in order to improve the performance of Chinese chunking. 1) We propose an approach to resolve the special problems of Chinese chunking. This approach extends the chunk tags for every problem by a tag-extension function. 2) We propose two novel voting methods based on the characteristics of chunking task. Compared with traditional voting methods, the proposed voting methods consider long distance information. The experimental results show that the SVMs model outperforms the other models and that our proposed approaches can improve performance significantly.