Open Vocabulary Learning for Neural Chinese Pinyin IME

Abstract

Pinyin-to-character (P2C) conversion is the core component of pinyin-based Chinese input method engine (IME). However, the conversion is seriously compromised by the ambiguities of Chinese characters corresponding to pinyin as well as the predefined fixed vocabularies. To alleviate such inconveniences, we propose a neural P2C conversion model augmented by a large online updating vocabulary with a target vocabulary sampling mechanism to support an open vocabulary learning during IME working. Our experiments show that the proposed approach reduces the decoding time on CPUs up to 50% on P2C tasks at the same or only negligible change in conversion accuracy, and the online updated vocabulary indeed helps our IME effectively follows user inputting behavior.

Publication
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2019)