A cyclic self-learning Chinese word segmentation for the geoscience domain

Abstract

Unlike English and other western languages, Chinese does not delimit words using white-spaces. Chinese Word Segmentation (CWS) is the crucial first step towards natural language processing. However, for the geoscience subject domain, the CWS problem remains unresolved with many challenges. Although traditional methods can be used to process geoscience documents, they lack the domain knowledge for massive geoscience documents. Considering the above challenges, this motivated us to build a segmenter specifically for the geoscience domain. Currently, most of the state-of-the-art methods for Chinese word segmentation are based on supervised learning, whose features are mostly extracted from a local context. In this paper, we proposed a framework for sequence learning by incorporating cyclic self-learning corpus training. Following this framework, we build the GeoSegmenter based on the Bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory (Bi-LSTM) network model to perform Chinese word segmentation. It can gain a great advantage through iterations of the training data. Empirical experimental results on geoscience documents and benchmark datasets showed that geological documents can be identified, and it can also recognize the generic documents.