Co-regularizing character-based and word-based models for semi-supervised Chinese word segmentation

This paper presents a semi-supervised Chinese word segmentation (CWS) approach that co-regularizes character-based and word-based models. Similarly to multi-view learning, the “segmentation agreements” between the two different types of view are used to overcome the scarcity of the label information on unlabeled data. The proposed approach trains a character-based and word-based model on labeled data, respectively, as the initial models. Then, the two models are constantly updated using unlabeled examples, where the learning objective is maximizing their segmentation agreements. The agreements are regarded as a set of valuable constraints for regularizing the learning of both models on unlabeled data. The segmentation for an input sentence is decoded by using a joint scoring function combining the two induced models. The evaluation on the Chinese tree bank reveals that our model results in better gains over the state-of-the-art semi-supervised models reported in the literature.