Towards Unified Chinese Segmentation Algorithm

As Chinese is an ideographic character-based language, the words in the texts are not delimited by spaces. Indexing of Chinese documents is impossible without a proper segmentation algorithm. Many Chinese segmentation algorithms have been proposed in the past. Traditional segmentation algorithms cannot operate without a large dictionary or a large corpus of training data. Nowadays, the Web has become the largest corpus that is ideal for Chinese segmentation. Although the search engines do not segment texts into proper words, they maintain huge databases of documents and frequencies of character sequences in the documents. Their databases are important potential resources for segmentation. In this paper, we propose a segmentation algorithm by mining web data with the help from search engines. It is the first unified segmentation algorithm for Chinese language from different geographical areas. Experiments have been conducted on the datasets of a recent Chinese segmentation competition. The results show that our algorithm outperforms the traditional algorithms in terms of precision and recall. Moreover, our algorithm can effectively deal with the problem of segmentation ambiguity, new word (unknown word) detection, and stop words.