Currently, the best performing models for Chinese word segmentation (CWS) are extremely resource intensive in terms of annotation data quantity. One promising solution to minimize the cost of data acquisition is active learning, which aims to actively select the most useful instances to annotate for learning. Active learning on CWS, however, remains challenging due to its inherent nature. In this paper, we propose a Word Boundary Annotation (WBA) model to make effective active learning on CWS possible. This is achieved by annotating only those uncertain boundaries. In this way, the manual annotation cost is largely reduced, compared to annotating the whole character sequence. To further minimize the annotation effort, a diversity measurement among the instances is considered to avoid duplicate annotation. Experimental results show that employing the WBA model and the diversity measurement into active learning on CWS can save much annotation cost with little loss in the performance.
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