This paper proposes a fast and simple unsupervised word segmentation algorithm that utilizes the local predictability of adjacent character sequences, while searching for a leasteffort representation of the data. The model uses branching entropy as a means of constraining the hypothesis space, in order to efficiently obtain a solution that minimizes the length of a two-part MDL code. An evaluation with corpora in Japanese, Thai, English, and the "CHILDES" corpus for research in language development reveals that the algorithm achieves an accuracy, comparable to that of the state-of-the-art methods in unsupervised word segmentation, in a significantly reduced computational time.
Zhikov et al. REF utilize the local predictability of adjacent character sequences, which is analogous to entropy.
An Efficient Algorithm for Unsupervised Word Segmentation with Branching Entropy and MDL
EMNLP
Computer Science