A Divide-Conquer Strategy for English Text Chunking

The traditional English text chunking approach identifies phrases by using only one model and phrases with the same types of features. It has been shown that the limitations of using only one model are that: the use of the same types of features is not suitable for all phrases, and data sparseness may also result. In this paper, the divide-conquer approach is proposed and applied in the identification of English phrases. This strategy divides the task of chunking into several sub-tasks according to sensitive features of each phrase and identifies different phrases in parallel. Then, a two-stage decreasing conflict strategy is used to synthesize each sub-task´s answer. By applying and testing the approach on the public training and test corpus, the F score for arbitrary phrases identification using divide-conquer strategy achieves 94.14% compared to the previous best F score of 94.17%