Bi-directional LSTM Recurrent Neural Network for Chinese Word Segmentation

Recurrent neural network(RNN) has been broadly applied to natural language processing(NLP) problems. This kind of neural network is designed for modeling sequential data and has been testified to be quite efficient in sequential tagging tasks. In this paper, we propose to use bi-directional RNN with long short-term memory(LSTM) units for Chinese word segmentation, which is a crucial preprocess task for modeling Chinese sentences and articles. Classical methods focus on designing and combining hand-craft features from context, whereas bi-directional LSTM network(BLSTM) does not need any prior knowledge or pre-designing, and it is expert in keeping the contextual information in both directions. Experiment result shows that our approach gets state-of-the-art performance in word segmentation on both traditional Chinese datasets and simplified Chinese datasets.