Patent ID: 6879951
Filing Date: 2005-04-12
Classification: G10L

Abstract:
1. A Chinese word segmentation apparatus that uses computer techniques to perform word segmentation processing on an input Chinese sentence, characterized by: a dictionary for characters with different pronunciations that stores all of the characters in the Chinese language with different pronunciations, all of the character phonetic symbols corresponding to the characters with the different pronunciations, and all of the candidate words corresponding to each of the character phonetic symbols and word phonetic symbols corresponding to the candidate words; a character phonetic dictionary that stores all of the characters in the Chinese language, initial preset phonetic symbols corresponding to the characters, and other possible phonetic symbols for the characters; a system dictionary that stores phonetic symbols of Chinese characters or words, and frequency of use, syntax markers and semantic markers corresponding to each of similarly sounding conflicting characters or similarly sounding conflicting words that correspond in turn with each of the phonetic symbols; a syntax information portion that stores a two-dimensional array formed from “1” or “0” bits to indicate whether or not different word categories can be connected in the Chinese language; a semantic information portion that stores rear-part semantic code of Chinese words and possible front-part semantic code corresponding to the rear-part semantic code; a character-to-phonetic converting portion that refers to the dictionary for characters with different pronunciations and to the character phonetic dictionary in order to convert a Chinese character string inputted to a computer into a phonetic symbol string; a candidate word-selecting portion that cuts the phonetic symbol string transmitted from the character-to-phonetic converting portion into syllables, that obtains all possible candidate words from the system dictionary by using each of the syllables as an indexing term, and that discards all unfeasible candidate words by referring to the inputted Chinese character string; an optimum candidate character string-deciding portion that interconnects the candidate words in the form of a directional network using starting and ending positions of each of the non-discarded candidate words in the inputted character string, that calculates semantic similarity degree prioritization and syntax prioritization for each of the candidate words by referring to the syntax information portion and the semantic information portion while taking into account the syntax markers and the semantic markers of every two back-to-back candidate words, that obtains a total estimate that is a function of frequency of use prioritization, word length prioritization, the syntax prioritization and the semantic similarity degree prioritization, and that finds a route for achieving an optimum estimate grade for word segmentation by using a dynamic programming method; and a word segmentation marking portion that retrieves the candidate words in the optimum route and that adds word segmentation markers thereto.