Ranking Algorithms for Named Entity Extraction: Boosting and the VotedPerceptron
This paper describes algorithms which rerank the top N hypotheses from a maximum-entropy tagger, the application being the recovery of named-entity boundaries in a corpus of web data. The first approach uses a boosting algorithm for ranking problems. The second approach uses the voted perceptron algorithm. Both algorithms give comparable, significant improvements over the maximum-entropy baseline. The voted perceptron algorithm can be considerably more efficient to train, at some cost in computation on test examples.