Sudachi: a Japanese Tokenizer for Business

Abstract

This paper presents Sudachi, a Japanese tokenizer and its accompanying language resources for business use. Tokenization, or morphological analysis, is a fundamental and important technology for processing a Japanese text, especially for industrial applications. However, we often face many obstacles for Japanese tokenization, such as the inconsistency of token unit in different resources, notation variations, discontinued maintenance of the resources, and various issues with the existing tokenizer implementations. In order to improve this situation, we develop a new tokenizer and a dictionary with features such as multi-granular output for different purposes and normalization of notation variations. In addition to this, we are planning to continuously maintain our software and resource in long-term as a part of the company business. We release the resulting tokenizer software and language resources freely available to the public as an open source software. You can access them at https://github.com/WorksApplications/Sudachi.

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