Word Boundary Information and Chinese Word Segmentation

Chinese word segmentation could be considered as a problem of word boundary recognition. Word boundary information plays a significant role in human language acquisition and automatic segmentation for Natural Language Processing (NLP). Extraction of word boundary information involves cognitive psychology, computational linguistics, and language education. Methods utilizing word boundary information exist in automatic prosodic and word segmentation, and some have obtained outstanding results. However, the researches of automatic word segmentation in today's NLP are mostly word-oriented, which focus on words instead of word boundaries. As an influential factor in human language recognition, word boundary information is worth more attention and more deeply research.