Exploiting salient word dependency for Chinese NP identification: A study on classifier noun phrase

NP identification is a challenging subtask of NLP. The reported literatures mainly focus on base noun phrase and maximal-length noun phrase, and deal with them as a sequence labeling problem. In this paper, unlike existing perspective, we concentrate on a special subcategory of Chinese NP, classifier noun phrase (CNP), and present a new approach which uses salient word dependency, such as classifier-noun collocation, for CNP identification. The experiment result is encouraging. Our study shows that salient relations between words should be fully utilized in NP identification as well as other NLP applications.