Papers › Optimal Hyperparameters for Deep LSTM-Networks for Sequence Labeling Tasks

Optimal Hyperparameters for Deep LSTM-Networks for Sequence Labeling Tasks

21 Jul 2017arXiv:1707.06799archive 2025-07-28

Nils Reimers, Iryna Gurevych

Selecting optimal parameters for a neural network architecture can often make the difference between mediocre and state-of-the-art performance. However, little is published which parameters and design choices should be evaluated or selected making the correct hyperparameter optimization often a "black art that requires expert experiences" (Snoek et al., 2012). In this paper, we evaluate the importance of different network design choices and hyperparameters for five common linguistic sequence tagging tasks (POS, Chunking, NER, Entity Recognition, and Event Detection). We evaluated over 50.000 different setups and found, that some parameters, like the pre-trained word embeddings or the last layer of the network, have a large impact on the performance, while other parameters, for example the number of LSTM layers or the number of recurrent units, are of minor importance. We give a recommendation on a configuration that performs well among different tasks.

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

UKPLab/emnlp2017-bilstm-cnn-crf officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubtfApache-2.0 report
jiesutd/NCRFpp mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
jiesutd/PyTorchSeqLabel mentioned on GitHubpytorchApache-2.0 report
jiesutd/yato mentioned on GitHubpytorchApache-2.0 report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

ChunkingEvent DetectionHyperparameter OptimizationNamed Entity Recognition (NER)POSWord Embeddings

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

LSTMSigmoid ActivationTanh Activation

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections