Structured SVMs

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Being edited by Rui Correia

The Method and When to Use it

Structured (or Structural) Support Vector Machines (SSVM), as the name states, is a machine learning model that generalizes the Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier, allowing training a classifier for structured output.

In general, SSVMs perform supervised learning by approximating a mapping

where is a set of labeled training examples and is a complex structured object, like trees, sequences, or sets, instead of simple univariate predictions (as in the SVM case).

Thus, training a SSVM classifier consists of showing pairs of correct sample and output label pairs, that are used for training, allowing to predict for new sample instances the corresponding output label

In NLP one can fing a great variety of problems that rely on complex outputs, such as parsing and Markov Models for part-of-speech tagging.

Training

While on training, for a set of samples and labels , the SSVM minimizes the risk function:


where is an arbitrary function, which measures the distance between to labels and is a function on samples and labels, which extracts feature vectors.


Since the equation above is non-differentiable, one can reformulate it introducing slack variables, , representing the value of the maximum. Using this approach the SSVM comes as:

      Failed to parse (syntax error): {\displaystyle  \{s.t.}   w'\Psi(x_n,y_n) - w'\Psi(x_n,y) + \xi_n \ge \Delta (y_n,y), n= 1,...,l \forall y \in Y }

      

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