Pointwise Prediction for Robust, Adaptable Japanese Morphological Analysis

We present a pointwise approach to Japanese morphological analysis (MA) that ignores structure information during learning and tagging. Despite the lack of structure, it is able to outperform the current state-of-the-art structured approach for Japanese MA, and achieves accuracy similar to that of structured predictors using the same feature set. We also find that the method is both robust to outof-domain data, and can be easily adapted through the use of a combination of partial annotation and active learning.