Discriminative Training of Sequence Taggers via Local Feature Matching

Sequence tagging is the task of predicting frame-wise labels for a given input sequence and has important applications to diverse domains. Conventional methods such as maximum likelihood (ML) learning matches global features in empirical and model distributions, rather than local features, which directly translates into frame-wise prediction errors. Recent probabilistic sequence models such as conditional random fields (CRFs) have achieved great success in a variety of situations. In this paper, we introduce a novel discriminative CRF learning algorithm to minimize local feature mismatches. Unlike overall data fitting originating from global feature matching in ML learning, our approach reduces the total error over all frames in a sequence. We also provide an efficient gradient-based learning method via gradient forward-backward recursion, which requires the same computational complexity as ML learning. For several real-world sequence tagging problems, we empirically demonstrate that the proposed learning algorithm achieves significantly more accurate prediction performance than standard estimators.