Recovering Casing and Punctuation using Conditional Random Fields
Marco Lui, Li Wang · 2013
This paper describes the winning entry to the ALTA Shared Task 2013. The theme of the shared task was recovery of casing and punctuation information from degraded English text. We tackle the task as a sequential labeling problem, jointly learning the casing and punctuation labels. We implement our sequential classifier using conditional random fields, trained using linguistic features extracted with offthe-shelf tools with simple adaptations to the specific task. We show the improvement due to adding each feature we consider, as well as the improvment due to utilizing additional training data beyond that supplied by the shared task organizers.