README.md

---
dataset_info:
  features:
  - name: chars
    sequence: string
  - name: labels
    sequence:
      class_label:
        names:
          '0': D
          '1': I
          '2': P
          '3': S
  splits:
  - name: train
    num_bytes: 2298515
    num_examples: 12290
  - name: validation
    num_bytes: 37643
    num_examples: 221
  - name: test
    num_bytes: 44203
    num_examples: 257
  download_size: 341126
  dataset_size: 2380361
configs:
- config_name: default
  data_files:
  - split: train
    path: data/train-*
  - split: validation
    path: data/validation-*
  - split: test
    path: data/test-*
language:
- yue
license: cc-by-4.0
task_categories:
- token-classification
---

This data is the subset of the Hong Kong Cantonese Corpus (HKCanCor) that has been re-segmented by the multi-tiered word segmentation scheme described in the following paper:

Charles Lam, Chaak-ming Lau, and Jackson L. Lee. 2024. Multi-Tiered Cantonese Word Segmentation. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 11993–12002, Torino, Italy. ELRA and ICCL.

## Processing from original format

Chinese word segmentation is commonly framed as a sequence labelling task. To ease the adoption of the original dataset, we have transformed it into two columns:

1. `chars`: The original sentence split into characters
2. `labels`: One of `D` (Dash), `I` (Intermediate), `P` (Pipe), `S` (Space). This labelling scheme expands the common BI (Beginning/Intermediate) scheme into four labels.
    In particular, the I is the same as the BI scheme but the B tag is further split into D, P, and S.

Here's a sample segmented sentence in the original format and the processed format:

Original: 即係 噉樣 嗰-啲 呀 ?

Processed:
* chars:  即 係 噉 樣 嗰 啲 呀 ?
* labels: S I S I S D S S

Note how the label is taken from the left boundary of the labelled character. For the left most character in a sentence, there is no boundary character to its left. In these cases, we set up a convention to always label the left most character as S (Space).

**Check out https://github.com/AlienKevin/dips for more details.**