We present a character-based model for joint segmentation and POS tagging for Chinese. The bidirectional RNN-CRF architecture for general sequence tagging is adapted and applied with novel vector representations of Chinese characters that capture rich contextual information and lower-than-character level features. The proposed model is extensively evaluated and compared with a state-of-the-art tagger respectively on CTB5, CTB9 and UD Chinese. The experimental results indicate that our model is

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... ccurate and robust across datasets in different sizes, genres and annotation schemes. We obtain state-of-the-art performance on CTB5, achieving 94.38 F1-score for joint segmentation and POS tagging.