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New Perspectives in Sinographic Language Processing through the Use of Character Structure

  • Conference paper
Book cover Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing (CICLing 2013)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 7816))

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Abstract

Chinese characters have a complex and hierarchical graphical structure carrying both semantic and phonetic information. We use this structure to enhance the text model and obtain better results in standard NLP operations. First of all, to tackle the problem of graphical variation we define allographic classes of characters. Next, the relation of inclusion of a subcharacter in a characters, provides us with a directed graph of allographic classes. We provide this graph with two weights: semanticity (semantic relation between subcharacter and character) and phoneticity (phonetic relation) and calculate “most semantic subcharacter paths” for each character. Finally, adding the information contained in these paths to unigrams we claim to increase the efficiency of text mining methods. We evaluate our method on a text classification task on two corpora (Chinese and Japanese) of a total of 18 million characters and get an improvement of 3% on an already high baseline of 89.6% precision, obtained by a linear SVM classifier. Other possible applications and perspectives of the system are discussed.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Lab-STICC UMR CNRS 6285, Institut Télécom - Télécom Bretagne, France

    Yannis Haralambous

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  1. Yannis Haralambous
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Computing Research, National Polytechnic Institute, Mexico D.F., Mexico

    Alexander Gelbukh

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Haralambous, Y. (2013). New Perspectives in Sinographic Language Processing through the Use of Character Structure. In: Gelbukh, A. (eds) Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing. CICLing 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7816. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-37247-6_17

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-37247-6_17

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-37246-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-37247-6

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