Toward a unified approach to statistical language modeling for Chinese

This article presents a unified approach to Chinese statistical language modeling (SLM). Applying SLM techniques like trigram language models to Chinese is challenging because (1) there is no standard definition of words in Chinese; (2) word boundaries are not marked by spaces; and (3) there is a dearth of training data. Our unified approach automatically and consistently gathers a high-quality training data set from the Web, creates a high-quality lexicon, segments the training data using this lexicon, and compresses the language model, all by using the maximum likelihood principle, which is consistent with trigram model training. We show that each of the methods leads to improvements over standard SLM, and that the combined method yields the best pinyin conversion result reported.