Conditional Random Fields for Word Hyphenation

Finding allowable places in words to insert hyphens is an important practical problem. The algorithm that is used most often nowadays has remained essentially unchanged for 25 years. This method is the TEX hyphenation algorithm of Knuth and Liang. We present here a hyphenation method that is clearly more accurate. The new method is an application of conditional random fields. We create new training sets for English and Dutch from the CELEX European lexical resource, and achieve error rates for English of less than 0.1% for correctly allowed hyphens, and less than 0.01% for Dutch. Experiments show that both the Knuth/Liang method and a leading current commercial alternative have error rates several times higher for both languages.