Linear Co-occurrence Rate Networks (L-CRNs) for Sequence Labeling

Sequence labeling has wide applications in natural language processing and speech processing. Popular sequence labeling models suffer from some known problems. Hidden Markov models (HMMs) are generative models and they cannot encode transition features; Conditional Markov models (CMMs) suffer from the label bias problem; And training of conditional random fields (CRFs) can be expensive. In this paper, we propose Linear Co-occurrence Rate Networks (L-CRNs) for sequence labeling which avoid the mentioned problems with existing models. The factors of L-CRNs can be locally normalized and trained separately, which leads to a simple and efficient training method. Experimental results on real-world natural language processing data sets show that L-CRNs reduce the training time by orders of magnitudes while achieve very competitive results to CRFs.