Word Segmentation for Burmese (Myanmar)

Abstract

Experiments on various word segmentation approaches for the Burmese language are conducted and discussed in this note. Specifically, dictionary-based, statistical, and machine learning approaches are tested. Experimental results demonstrate that statistical and machine learning approaches perform significantly better than dictionary-based approaches. We believe that this note, based on an annotated corpus of relatively considerable size (containing approximately a half million words), is the first systematic comparison of word segmentation approaches for Burmese. This work aims to discover the properties and proper approaches to Burmese textual processing and to promote further researches on this understudied language.