Dzongkha word segmentation

Dzongkha, the national language of Bhutan, is continuous in written form and it fails to mark the word boundary. Dzongkha word segmentation is one of the fundamental problems and a prerequisite that needs to be solved before more advanced Dzongkha text processing and other natural language processing tools can be developed. This paper presents our initial attempt at segmenting Dzongkha sentences into words. The paper describes the implementation of Maximal Matching (Dictionary based Approach) followed by bigram techniques (Non-dictionary based Approach) in segmenting the Dzongkha scripts. Although the used techniques are basic and naive, it provides a baseline of the Dzongkha word segmentation task. Preliminary experimental results show percentage of segmentation accuracy. However, the segmentation accuracy is dependent on the type of document domain and size and quality of the lexicon and the corpus. Some of the related issues for future directions are also discussed