A hybrid method for Chinese address segmentation

Chinese address segmentation is a serious challenge in geographic information system geocoding. Most previous studies have relied on predefined gazetteers without considering the information contained by a raw address corpus. In this paper, a hybrid method employing both rule-based and statistical methods is proposed for Chinese address segmentation without a predefined gazetteer. This approach utilizes statistical methods to extract address information from a raw address corpus and a rule-based method to segment Chinese addresses. Two typical statistical methods and their combinations with rule-based methods are compared with the hybrid method in an experiment involving approximately 460,000 address items in Shenzhen City, China. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method achieves an F-score of over 0.8, which is better than those of existing methods, thus validating the proposed method.