  Taking greedy decoding algorithm as it should be, this work focuses on
further strengthening the model itself for Chinese word segmentation (CWS),
which results in an even more fast and more accurate CWS model. Our model
consists of an attention only stacked encoder and a light enough decoder for
the greedy segmentation plus two highway connections for smoother training, in
which the encoder is composed of a newly proposed Transformer variant,
Gaussian-masked Directional (GD) Transformer, and a biaffine attention scorer.
With the effective encoder design, our model only needs to take unigram
features for scoring. Our model is evaluated on SIGHAN Bakeoff benchmark
datasets. The experimental results show that with the highest segmentation
speed, the proposed model achieves new state-of-the-art or comparable
performance against strong baselines in terms of strict closed test setting.
