Chunking with Max-Margin Markov Networks

PACLIC / The University of the Philippines Visayas Cebu College Cebu City, Philippines / November 20-22, 200

Enhanced sequence labeling based on latent variable conditional random fields

Natural language processing is a useful processing technique of language data, such as text and speech. Sequence labeling represents the upstream task of many natural language processing tasks, such as machine translation, text classification, and sentiment classification. In this paper, the focus is on the sequence labeling task, in which semantic labels are assigned to each unit of a given input sequence. Two frameworks of latent variable conditional random fields (CRF) models (called LVCRF-I and LVCRF-II) are proposed, which use the encoding schema as a latent variable to capture the latent structure of the hidden variables and the observed data. Among the two designed models, the LVCRF-I model focuses on the sentence level, while the LVCRF-II works in the word level, to choose the best encoding schema for a given input sequence automatically without handcraft features. In the experiments, the two proposed models are verified by four sequence prediction tasks, including named entity recognition (NER), chunking, reference parsing and POS tagging. The proposed frameworks achieve better performance without using other handcraft features than the conventional CRF model. Moreover, these designed frameworks can be viewed as a substitution of the conventional CRF models. In the commonly used LSTM-CRF models, the CRF layer can be replaced with our proposed framework as they use the same training and inference procedure. The experimental results show that the proposed models exhibit latent variable and provide competitive and robust performance on all three sequence prediction tasks

Chinese text chunking using lexicalized HMMS

This paper presents a lexicalized HMM-based approach to Chinese text chunking. To tackle the problem of unknown words, we formalize Chinese text chunking as a tagging task on a sequence of known words. To do this, we employ the uniformly lexicalized HMMs and develop a lattice-based tagger to assign each known word a proper hybrid tag, which involves four types of information: word boundary, POS, chunk boundary and chunk type. In comparison with most previous approaches, our approach is able to integrate different features such as part-of-speech information, chunk-internal cues and contextual information for text chunking under the framework of HMMs. As a result, the performance of the system can be improved without losing its efficiency in training and tagging. Our preliminary experiments on the PolyU Shallow Treebank show that the use of lexicalization technique can substantially improve the performance of a HMM-based chunking system. © 2005 IEEE.published_or_final_versio

Unsupervised Chunking Based on Graph Propagation from Bilingual Corpus

This paper presents a novel approach for unsupervised shallow parsing model trained on the unannotated Chinese text of parallel Chinese-English corpus. In this approach, no information of the Chinese side is applied. The exploitation of graph-based label propagation for bilingual knowledge transfer, along with an application of using the projected labels as features in unsupervised model, contributes to a better performance. The experimental comparisons with the state-of-the-art algorithms show that the proposed approach is able to achieve impressive higher accuracy in terms of F-score