Ambiguous (((Par(t)(it))((ion))(s))(in)) Thai Text

Despite the importance of segmentation to a variety of software applications, almost nothing is known about the characteristics or distribution of ambiguous partitions (eg. to Pend vs. top_end) in Thai text. By using special-purpose code to investigate a large (-400K word) text corpus, we were able to extract 36,267 such sequences, involving 9,253 distinct examples. Of these, a little more than two-fifths involved genuinely ambiguous partitions. We classify partitioning problems into distinct categories, report on many of their statistical and lexical characteristics, and describe heuristics for choosing the correct partition that do not depend on the availability of a large segmented corpus.