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OpenKorPOS: Democratizing Korean Tokenization with Voting-Based Open Corpus Annotation

Korean is a language with complex morphology that uses spaces at larger-than-word boundaries, unlike other East-Asian languages. While morpheme-based text generation can provide significant semantic advantages compared to commonly used character-level approaches, Korean morphological analyzers only provide a sequence of morpheme-level tokens, losing information in the tokenization process. Two crucial issues are the loss of spacing information and subcharacter level morpheme normalization, both of which make the tokenization result challenging to reconstruct the original input string, deterring the application to generative tasks. As this problem originates from the conventional scheme used when creating a POS tagging corpus, we propose an improvement to the existing scheme, which makes it friendlier to generative tasks. On top of that, we suggest a fully-automatic annotation of a corpus by leveraging public analyzers. We vote the surface and POS from the outcome and fill the sequence with the selected morphemes, yielding tokenization with a decent quality that incorporates space information. Our scheme is verified via an evaluation done on an external corpus, and subsequently, it is adapted to Korean Wikipedia to construct an open, permissive resource. We compare morphological analyzer performance trained on our corpus with existing methods, then perform an extrinsic evaluation on a downstream task.