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Piecewise training for structured prediction

delete2009-06-16
delete28
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OA
AI
C
Charles Sutton *
A
Andrew McCallum
DOI:10.1007/s10994-009-5112-zdelete
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Abstract

Abstract

En 中文
A drawback of structured prediction methods is that parameter estimation requires repeated inference, which is intractable for general structures. In this paper, we present an approximate training algorithm called piecewise training (PW) that divides the factors into tractable subgraphs, which we call pieces, that are trained independently. Piecewise training can be interpreted as approximating the exact likelihood using belief propagation, and different ways of making this interpretation yield different insights into the method. We also present an extension to piecewise training, called piecewise pseudolikelihood (PWPL), designed for when variables have large cardinality. On several real-world natural language processing tasks, piecewise training performs superior to Besag's pseudolikelihood and sometimes comparably to exact maximum likelihood. In addition, PWPL performs similarly to PW and superior to standard pseudolikelihood, but is five to ten times more computationally efficient than batch maximum likelihood training.
Keywords:
Graphical models
Conditional random fields
Local training
Belief propagation

Journal

Machine Learning cover
Machine Learning
IF:
2.9
Papers:
2.6K
Citations:
3.4W

Organization

U
university of massachusetts system
Scholars:
3.8W
Papers: 3.5W
Citations: 42