We present a system for the semantic role labeling task. The system combines a machine learning technique with an inference procedure based on integer linear programming that supports the incorporation of linguistic and structural constraints into the decision process. The system is tested on the data provided in the CoNLL-2004 shared task on semantic role labeling and achieves very competitive results. 1

In this paper we investigate a structured model for jointly classifying the sentiment of text at varying levels of granularity. Inference in the model is based on standard sequence classification techniques using constrained Viterbi to ensure consistent solutions. The primary advantage of such a model is that it allows classification decisions from one level in the text to influence decisions at another. Experiments show that this method can significantly reduce classification error relative to models trained in isolation. 1

Sentence compression holds promise for many applications ranging from summarization to subtitle generation. Our work views sentence compression as an optimization problem and uses integer linear programming (ILP) to infer globally optimal compressions in the presence of linguistically motivated constraints. We show how previous formulations of sentence compression can be recast as ILPs and extend these models with novel global constraints. Experimental results on written and spoken texts demonstrate improvements over state-of-the-art models. 1.

Traditional noun phrase coreference resolution systems represent features only of pairs of noun phrases. In this paper, we propose a machine learning method that enables features over sets of noun phrases, resulting in a first-order probabilistic model for coreference. We outline a set of approximations that make this approach practical, and apply our method to the ACE coreference dataset, achieving a 45 % error reduction over a comparable method that only considers features of pairs of noun phrases. This result demonstrates an example of how a firstorder logic representation can be incorporated into a probabilistic model and scaled efficiently. 1

We study learning structured output in a discriminative framework where values of the output variables are estimated by local classifiers. In this framework, complex dependencies among the output variables are captured by constraints and dictate which global labels can be inferred. We compare two strategies, learning independent classifiers and inference based training, by observing their behaviors in different conditions. Experiments and theoretical justification lead to the conclusion that using inference based learning is superior when the local classifiers are difficult to learn but may require many examples before any discernible difference can be observed. 1

In many structured prediction problems, the highest-scoring labeling is hard to compute exactly, leading to the use of approximate inference methods. However, when inference is used in a learning algorithm, a good approximation of the score may not be sufficient. We show in particular that learning can fail even with an approximate inference method with rigorous approximation guarantees. There are two reasons for this. First, approximate methods can effectively reduce the expressivity of an underlying model by making it impossible to choose parameters that reliably give good predictions. Second, approximations can respond to parameter changes in such a way that standard learning algorithms are misled. In contrast, we give two positive results in the form of learning bounds for the use of LP-relaxed inference in structured perceptron and empirical risk minimization settings. We argue that without understanding combinations of inference and learning, such as these, that are appropriately compatible, learning performance under approximate inference cannot be guaranteed. 1

Integer Linear Programming has recently been used for decoding in a number of probabilistic models in order to enforce global constraints. However, in certain applications, such as non-projective dependency parsing and machine translation, the complete formulation of the decoding problem as an integer linear program renders solving intractable. We present an approach which solves the problem incrementally, thus we avoid creating intractable integer linear programs. This approach is applied to Dutch dependency parsing and we show how the addition of linguistically motivated constraints can yield a significant improvement over stateof-the-art. 1

We present a general framework for semantic role labeling. The framework combines a machine learning technique with an integer linear programming based inference procedure, which incorporates linguistic and structural constraints into a global decision process. Within this framework, we study the role of syntactic parsing information in semantic role labeling. We show that full syntactic parsing information is, by far, most relevant in identifying the argument, especially, in the very first stage—the pruning stage. Surprisingly, the quality of the pruning stage cannot be solely determined based on its recall and precision. Instead, it depends on the characteristics of the output candidates that determine the difficulty of the downstream problems. Motivated by this observation, we propose an effective and simple approach of combining different semantic role labeling systems through joint inference, which significantly improves its performance. Our system has been evaluated in the CoNLL-2005 shared task on semantic role labeling, and achieves the highest F1 score among 19 participants.

This paper focuses on semantic role labeling using automatically-generated syntactic information. A simple and robust strategy for system combination is presented, which allows to partially recover from input parsing errors and to significantly boost results of individual systems. This combination scheme is also very flexible since the individual systems are not required to provide any information other than their solution. Extensive experimental evaluation in the CoNLL-2005 shared task framework supports our previous claims. The proposed architecture outperforms the best results reported in that evaluation exercise.

We present an approach for the joint extraction of entities and relations in the context of opinion recognition and analysis. We identify two types of opinion-related entities — expressions of opinions and sources of opinions — along with the linking relation that exists between them. Inspired by Roth and Yih (2004), we employ an integer linear programming approach to solve the joint opinion recognition task, and show that global, constraint-based inference can significantly boost the performance of both relation extraction and the extraction of opinion-related entities. Performance further improves when a semantic role labeling system is incorporated. The resulting system achieves F-measures of 79 and 69 for entity and relation extraction, respectively, improving substantially over prior results in the area. 1