Word segmentation errors may lead to the wrong interpretation of homographs, and undesired effects in prosodic modeling. It is a major task in text processing to disambiguate the multiple usages and to pick the correct pronunciation. The simple cases are the ones that can be disambiguated within the word. In that case, the pronunciation can be annotated in the dictionary, and so long as the word parsing is correct, the right pronunciation will be chosen. The difficult cases are the ones that are not listed in a dictionary.
Disambiguation thus requires information from a larger context.
We will continue to implement other cases. The Chinese writing system does not distinctively mark proper names in the orthography. The character is typically pronounced shen3 as a family name. The character is typically pronounced yue4 as a family name, but le4 as a given name. Mandarin reads the number 2 in two ways, er4 as a digit or an ordinal number, and liang3 as an unit used in front of a measure word.