Design of Chinese Morphological Analyzer

This is a pilot study which aims at the design of a Chinese morphological analyzer which is in state to predict the syntactic and semantic properties of nominal, verbal and adjectival compounds. Morphological structures of compound words contain the essential information of knowing their syntactic and semantic characteristics. In particular, morphological analysis is a primary step for predicting the syntactic and semantic categories of out-of-vocabulary (unknown) words. The designed Chinese morphological analyzer contains three major functions, 1) to segment a word into a sequence of morphemes, 2) to tag the part-of-speech of those morphemes, and 3) to identify the morpho-syntactic relation between morphemes. We propose a method of using associative strength among morphemes, morpho-syntactic patterns, and syntactic categories to solve the ambiguities of segmentation and part-of-speech. In our evaluation report, it is found that the accuracy of our analyzer is 81%. 5% errors are caused by the segmentation and 14% errors are due to part-of-speech. Once the internal information of a compound is known, it would be beneficial for the further researches of the prediction of a word meaning and its function.