Word Segmentation of Vietnamese Texts: a Comparison of Approaches

We present in this paper a comparison between three segmentation systems for the Vietnamese language. Indeed, the majority of Vietnamese words is built by semantic composition from about 7,000 syllables, that also have a meaning as isolated words. So the identification of word boundaries in a text is not a simple task, and ambiguities often appear. Beyond the presentation of the tested systems, we also propose a standard definition for word segmentation in Vietnamese, and introduce a reference corpus developed for the purpose of evaluating such a task. The results observed confirm that it can be relatively well treated by automatic means, although a solution needs to be found to take into account out-of-vocabulary words.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: LREC
• Authors: Quang Thang Dinh, Hong Phuong Le, Thi Minh Huyen Nguyen, Cam-Tu Nguyen, Mathias Rossignol, Xuân Luong Vu
• Keywords: Education, LREC 2008, Segmentation Systems, Vietnamese Language, Vietnamese Words