Collocation and Thai Word Segmentation

This paper presents another approach of Thai word segmentation, which is composed of two processes : syllable segmentation and syllable merging. Syllable segmentation is done on the basis of trigram statistics. Syllable merging is done on the basis of collocation between syllables. We argue that many of word segmentation ambiguities can be resolved at the level of syllable segmentation. Since a syllable is a more well-defined unit and more consistent in analysis than a word, this approach is more reliable than other approaches that use a wordsegmented corpus. This approach can perform well at the level of accuracy 81-98% depending on the dictionary used in the segmentation.