Sutton McCullum ICML 2007: Piecewise pseudolikelihood for efficient CRF training

Citation

Piecewise Pseudolikelihood for Efficient Training of Conditional Random Fields. By Charles Sutton, Andrew McCallum. In ICML, vol. {{{volume}}} ({{{issue}}}), 2007.

Online version

This Paper is available here.

Summary

Discriminative training of graphical models is expensive if the cardinality of the variables is large. Generally pseudo-likelihood reduces the cost of inference, but compromises on accuracy. Piecewise training although is accurate, is expensive in a similar way. The authors try to maximize the pseudo-likelihood on the piecewise model.

Definition of Piecewise Pseudo likelihood

For a single instance ${\vec {x}},{\vec {y}}$,

${\mathcal {L}}_{\mbox{PWPL}}(\Lambda ,{\vec {x}},{\vec {y}})=\sum _{a}\sum _{s\in a}\ln p_{\mbox{LCL}}(y_{s}|{\vec {y}}_{a-s},{\vec {x}},\lambda _{a})$

where

$p_{\mbox{LCL}}(y_{s}|{\vec {y}}_{a-s},{\vec {x}},\lambda _{a})={\frac {\Psi _{a}(y_{s}|{\vec {y}}_{a-s},{\vec {x}},\lambda _{a})}{Z({\vec {y}}_{a-s},{\vec {x}},\lambda _{a})}}$

Therefore the optimization function is

$O=\sum _{i}{\mathcal {L}}_{\mbox{PWPL}}(\Lambda ,{\vec {x}}^{(i)},{\vec {y}}^{(i)})-\sum _{a}{\frac {\lambda _{a}^{2}}{2\sigma ^{2}}}$

where the second term is the standard gaussian prior to prevent over fitting.

Experimental results

• Sequences generated by a 2 order HMM.

• POS tagging on Penn Treebank set.