Language/Multiple-languages/Culture/Text-Processing-Tools

In some languages, words are not separated by spaces, for example: Chinese, Japanese, Lao, Thai. In Vietnamese, spaces are used to divide syllables instead of words. This brings about difficulties for computer programs like VocabHunter, gritz and text-memorize, where words are detected only with spaces.

The solution is called “word segmentation”, which detects words and insert spaces in between. Sounds like easy, but they have to deal with ambiguities and unknown words including proper names, the time and accuracy are both to be considered. It can be based on the dictionary or machine learning.

Here are free and open-source tools to do it:

Chinese:

• Ansj https://github.com/NLPchina/ansj_seg
• CoreNLP https://github.com/stanfordnlp/CoreNLP
• FoolNLTK https://github.com/rockyzhengwu/FoolNLTK
• FudanNLP https://github.com/FudanNLP/fnlp
• HanLP https://github.com/hankcs/HanLP
• jieba https://github.com/fxsjy/jieba
• LAC https://github.com/baidu/lac
• LTP https://github.com/HIT-SCIR/ltp
• SnowNLP https://github.com/isnowfy/snownlp
• pkuseg https://github.com/lancopku/pkuseg-python
• pyhanlp https://github.com/hankcs/pyhanlp
• THULAC https://github.com/thunlp/THULAC-Python

Japanese:

• janome https://github.com/mocobeta/janome
• Juman++ https://github.com/ku-nlp/jumanpp
• Kagome https://github.com/ikawaha/kagome
• Kuromoji https://github.com/atilika/kuromoji / https://github.com/takuyaa/kuromoji.js/
• KyTea http://www.phontron.com/kytea/
• MeCab https://taku910.github.io/mecab/
• nagisa https://github.com/taishi-i/nagisa
• Sudachi https://github.com/WorksApplications/Sudachi / https://github.com/WorksApplications/SudachiPy

Thai:

• Cutkum https://github.com/pucktada/cutkum
• CutThai https://github.com/pureexe/cutthai
• Deepcut https://github.com/rkcosmos/deepcut
• PyThaiNLP https://github.com/PyThaiNLP/pythainlp
• SWATH https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~paisarn/software.html
• SynThai https://github.com/KrakenAI/SynThai
• TLTK https://pypi.org/project/tltk/
• wordcut https://github.com/veer66/wordcut / https://github.com/veer66/wordcutpy

They are mostly written in Python, which is an important language in machine learning. It's very easy to use: just create a blank “.py” file, write a line to import from the library, write a line to segment the text, write a line to save the result.

If you don't know Python, please try this: