Integer Linear Programming in NLP - Constrained Conditional Models

Ming-Wei Wang, Nicholas Rizzolo, Dan Roth

Abstract: Making decisions in natural language processing problems often involves assigning values to sets of interdependent variables where the expressive dependency structure can influence, or even dictate, what assignments are possible. Structured learning problems such as semantic role labeling provide one such example, but the setting is broader and includes a range of problems such as name entity and relation recognition and co-reference resolution. The setting is also appropriate for cases that may require a solution to make use of multiple (possible pre-designed or pre-learned components) as in summarization, textual entailment and question answering. In all these cases, it is natural to formulate the decision problem as a constrained optimization problem, with an objective function that is composed of learned models, subject to domain or problem specific constraints.