Papers › Evaluating the Utility of Hand-crafted Features in Sequence Labelling
Evaluating the Utility of Hand-crafted Features in Sequence Labelling
Minghao Wu, Fei Liu, Trevor Cohn
Conventional wisdom is that hand-crafted features are redundant for deep learning models, as they already learn adequate representations of text automatically from corpora. In this work, we test this claim by proposing a new method for exploiting handcrafted features as part of a novel hybrid learning approach, incorporating a feature auto-encoder loss component. We evaluate on the task of named entity recognition (NER), where we show that including manual features for part-of-speech, word shapes and gazetteers can improve the performance of a neural CRF model. We obtain a F₁ of 91.89 for the CoNLL-2003 English shared task, which significantly outperforms a collection of highly competitive baseline models. We also present an ablation study showing the importance of auto-encoding, over using features as either inputs or outputs alone, and moreover, show including the autoencoder components reduces training requirements to 60%, while retaining the same predictive accuracy.
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Code
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Code Syntology ran Syntology
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Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Named Entity Recognition (NER) | CoNLL 2003 (English) | Neural-CRF+AE | F1 | 92.29 | #45 of 73 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Named Entity Recognition (NER) | CoNLL 2003 (English) | CRF + AutoEncoder | F1 | 91.87 | #52 of 73 | Archive leaderboard | report |
Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.
Methods
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