Deep Stacking Networks for Low-Resource Chinese Word Segmentation with Transfer Learning

In recent years, neural networks have proven to be effective in Chinese word segmentation. However, this promising performance relies on large-scale training data. Neural networks with conventional architectures cannot achieve the desired results in low-resource datasets due to the lack of labelled training data. In this paper, we propose a deep stacking framework to improve the performance on word segmentation tasks with insufficient data by integrating datasets from diverse domains. Our framework consists of two parts, domain-based models and deep stacking networks. The domain-based models are used to learn knowledge from different datasets. The deep stacking networks are designed to integrate domain-based models. To reduce model conflicts, we innovatively add communication paths among models and design various structures of deep stacking networks, including Gaussian-based Stacking Networks, Concatenate-based Stacking Networks, Sequence-based Stacking Networks and Tree-based Stacking Networks. We conduct experiments on six low-resource datasets from various domains. Our proposed framework shows significant performance improvements on all datasets compared with several strong baselines.