Improving nonparameteric Bayesian inference
Mark S. Johnson, Sharon J. Goldwater · 2009
One of the reasons nonparametric Bayesian inference is attracting attention in computational linguistics is because it provides a principled way of learning the units of generalization together with their probabilities. Adaptor grammars are a framework for defining a variety of hierarchical nonparametric Bayesian models. This paper investigates some of the choices that arise in formulating adaptor grammars and associated inference procedures, and shows that they can have a dramatic impact on performance in an unsupervised word segmentation task. With appropriate adaptor grammars and inference procedures we achieve an 87% word token f-score on the standard Brent version of the Bernstein-Ratner corpus, which is an error reduction of over 35% over the best previously reported results for this corpus.