Chinese text chunking using lexicalized HMMs

This paper presents a lexicalized HMM-based approach to Chinese text chunking. To tackle the problem of unknown words, we formalize Chinese text chunking as a tagging task on a sequence of known words. To do this, we employ the uniformly lexicalized HMMs and develop a lattice-based tagger to assign each known word a proper hybrid tag, which involves four types of information: word boundary, POS, chunk boundary and chunk type. In comparison with most previous approaches, our approach is able to integrate different features such as part-of-speech information, chunk-internal cues and contextual information for text chunking under the framework of HMMs. As a result, the performance of the system can be improved without losing its efficiency in training and tagging. Our preliminary experiments on the PolyU Shallow Treebank show that the use of lexicalization technique can substantially improve the performance of a HMM-based chunking system.