Incorporating knowledge for joint Chinese word segmentation and part-of-speech tagging with SynSemGCN

Purpose

Recent trends have shown the integration of Chinese word segmentation (CWS) and part-of-speech (POS) tagging to enhance syntactic and semantic parsing. However, the potential utility of hierarchical and structural information in these tasks remains underexplored. This study aims to leverage multiple external knowledge sources (e.g. syntactic and semantic features, lexicons) through various modules for the joint task.

Design/methodology/approach

We introduce a novel learning framework for the joint CWS and POS tagging task, utilizing graph convolutional networks (GCNs) to encode syntactic structure and semantic features. The framework also incorporates a pre-defined lexicon through a lexicon attention module. We evaluate our model on a range of public corpora, including CTB5, PKU and UD, the novel ZX dataset and the comprehensive CTB9 dataset.

Findings

Experimental results on these benchmark corpora demonstrate the effectiveness of our model in improving the performance of the joint task. Notably, we find that syntax information significantly enhances performance, while lexicon information helps mitigate the issue of out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words.

Originality/value

This study introduces a comprehensive approach to the joint CWS and POS tagging task by combining multiple features. Moreover, the proposed framework offers potential adaptability to other sequence labeling tasks, such as named entity recognition (NER).