A NEURAL NETWORK THAT LEARNS TO DO HYPHENATION

Abstract

Hyphenation of German words is a highly irregular problem. Existing solutions for automatic hyphenation are not very satisfying. We successfully applied a “sequential network” to this problem. The training algorithm was standard backpropagation. The network was trained with a collection of 1000 German words together with their correct hyphenation. In subsequent tests with unknown words we achieved a correctness of 96.8 percent. Analysis of the simulation results indicate, that with further increases of the training data improvements are still possible.