  Chinese word segmentation and dependency parsing are two fundamental tasks
for Chinese natural language processing. The dependency parsing is defined on
word-level. Therefore word segmentation is the precondition of dependency
parsing, which makes dependency parsing suffer from error propagation and
unable to directly make use of the character-level pre-trained language model
(such as BERT). In this paper, we propose a graph-based model to integrate
Chinese word segmentation and dependency parsing. Different from previous
transition-based joint models, our proposed model is more concise, which
results in fewer efforts of feature engineering. Our graph-based joint model
achieves better performance than previous joint models and state-of-the-art
results in both Chinese word segmentation and dependency parsing. Besides, when
BERT is combined, our model can substantially reduce the performance gap of
dependency parsing between joint models and gold-segmented word-based models.
Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/fastnlp/JointCwsParser.
