Chinese word segmentation is especially fragile in non-standard text, where language learner errors and other character-level divergences disrupt the word boundaries assumed by downstream annotation and evaluation. This paper formulates Chinese word boundary recovery as an alignment-based projection task. Given a noisy source sentence and a cleaner target counterpart, we first align the two strings at the character level and then project target-side word boundaries back onto the source. Beyond the recovery method itself, we introduce two evaluation resources: a manually checked learner Chinese benchmark based on MuCGEC and a controlled synthetic benchmark derived from the Chinese Penn Treebank. Experiments show that direct segmentation remains vulnerable to compound fragmentation in learner input, whereas the proposed two step projection method corrects many over-segmentation errors by using the corrected target to recover source-side word spans. The results show that word boundary recovery is distinct from ordinary segmentation and that alignment projection provides a principled mechanism for stabilizing Chinese annotation and evaluation under noisy input.
Text recognition, or extracting electronic text from document images, has been indispensable for knowledge retrieval tasks, such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). For Khmer, extracted text is subject to an extra word segmentation step, as Khmer does not use any visible word delimiters to denote word boundaries. Thus, a recognition-then-segmentation pipeline for Khmer requires two separate sequential models; this is not only error-prone but also adds significant latency for large-scale document processing. This paper proposes a novel joint Khmer text recognition and word segmentation framework in a unified model. The proposed model, using a connectionist-temporal-classification (CTC) decoder for fast, parallel decoding, can be instructed to recognize Khmer text with (b=1) and without (b=0) word segmentation. Experimental results on different benchmark datasets of different document modalities (document, scene, and handwritten images) show that the proposed model can not only recognize characters in document images but also locate word boundaries, removing the need for an extra word segmentation step in a conventional sequential pipeline.
Adaptive latent tokenization maps a fine-grained input to a shorter sequence of continuous representations associated with input-dependent spans. We introduce ReconSpan, which divides text into chunks that a backward decoder can reconstruct from a single contextual prefix code and retains one such code as the latent token for each chunk. The reconstruction criterion is applied when chunks are formed, allowing one trained autoencoder to produce average chunk lengths from 6.5 to 12.2. At matched average length, reconstruction-guided boundaries preserve more text than random boundaries. Readers of the resulting latent sequence recover topic information reliably but struggle to extract exact details.
Phonetic forced alignment is a key technique in phonetic research, yet existing alignment systems lack specialized models for low-resource language varieties. We address this by training text-dependent and text-independent aligners for Chengdu Mandarin using a 17-hour corpus and a custom G2P dictionary. We trained a text-dependent GMM-HMM model (Chengdu-MFA) and fine-tuned a pretrained audio encoder on frame classification with Chengdu-MFA's pseudo label for text-independent alignment (Chengdu-FC). Evaluation on an expert-annotated test set show that both methods significantly outperform Standard Mandarin baselines. Chengdu-MFA reduced average phone boundary differences by 31.8%, while Chengdu-FC achieved a 61.2% reduction. This work establishes a practical bootstrapping pipeline for developing accurate aligners for under-resourced varieties without labor- and time-intensive manual annotation.