Skip to main content
Other
Piecewise Pseudolikelihood for Efficient Training of Conditional Random Fields
Computer Science Department Faculty Publication Series
  • Charles Sutton, University of Massachusetts - Amherst
  • Andrew McCallum, University of Massachusetts - Amherst
Publication Date
2007
Abstract

Discriminative training of graphical models can be expensive if the variables have large cardinality, even if the graphical structure is tractable. In such cases, pseudolikelihood is an attractive alternative, because its running time is linear in the variable cardinality, but on some data its accuracy can be poor. Piecewise training (Sutton & McCallum, 2005) can have better accuracy but does not scale as well in the variable cardinality. In this paper, we introduce piecewise pseudolikelihood, which retains the computational efficiency of pseudolikelihood but can have much better accuracy. On several benchmark NLP data sets, piecewise pseudolikelihood has better accuracy than standard pseudolikelihood, and in many cases nearly equivalent to maximum likelihood, with five to ten times less training time than batch CRF training.

Disciplines
Comments
This paper was harvested from CiteSeer
Citation Information
Charles Sutton and Andrew McCallum. "Piecewise Pseudolikelihood for Efficient Training of Conditional Random Fields" (2007)
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/andrew_mccallum/7/