Papers › Masked Conditional Random Fields for Sequence Labeling

Masked Conditional Random Fields for Sequence Labeling

19 Mar 2021NAACL 2021 4arXiv:2103.10682archive 2025-07-28

Tianwen Wei, Jianwei Qi, Shenghuan He, Songtao Sun

Conditional Random Field (CRF) based neural models are among the most performant methods for solving sequence labeling problems. Despite its great success, CRF has the shortcoming of occasionally generating illegal sequences of tags, e.g. sequences containing an "I-" tag immediately after an "O" tag, which is forbidden by the underlying BIO tagging scheme. In this work, we propose Masked Conditional Random Field (MCRF), an easy to implement variant of CRF that impose restrictions on candidate paths during both training and decoding phases. We show that the proposed method thoroughly resolves this issue and brings consistent improvement over existing CRF-based models with near zero additional cost.

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DandyQi/MaskedCRF officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubtf report
ZenBel/maskedCRF mentioned on GitHubtf report
zhw666888/Pytorch-MCRF mentioned on GitHubpytorch report

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