Efficiently Inducing Features of Conditional Random Fields
Conditional Random Fields (CRFs) are undirected graphical models, a special case of which correspond to conditionally-trained finite state machines. A key advantage of CRFs is their great flexibility to include a wide variety of arbitrary, non-independent features of the input. Faced with this freedom, however, an important question remains: what features should be used? This paper presents an efficient feature induction method for CRFs. The method is founded on the principle of iteratively constructing feature conjunctions that would significantly increase conditional log-likelihood if added to the model. Automated feature induction enables not only improved accuracy and dramatic reduction in parameter count, but also the use of larger cliques, and more freedom to liberally hypothesize atomic input variables that may be relevant to a task. The method applies to linear-chain CRFs, as well as to more arbitrary CRF structures, such as Relational Markov Networks, where it corresponds to learning clique templates, and can also be understood as supervised structure learning. Experimental results on named entity extraction and noun phrase segmentation tasks are presented.