The first international Chinese word segmentation Bakeoff

This paper presents the results from the ACL-SIGHAN-sponsored First International Chinese Word Segmentation Bakeoff held in 2003 and reported in conjunction with the Second SIGHAN Workshop on Chinese Language Processing, Sapporo, Japan. We give the motivation for having an international segmentation contest (given that there have been two within-China contests to date) and we report on the results of this first international contest, analyze these results, and make some recommendations for the future.