We study the use of greedy feature selection methods for morphosyntactic tagging under a number of different conditions. We compare a static ordering of features to a dynamic ordering based on mutual information statistics, and we apply the techniques to standalone taggers as well as joint systems for tagging and parsing. Experiments on five languages show that feature selection can result in more compact models as well as higher accuracy under all conditions, but also that a dynamic ordering works better than a static ordering and that joint systems benefit more than standalone taggers. We also show that the same techniques can be used to select which morphosyntactic categories to predict in order to maximize syntactic accuracy in a joint system. Our final results represent a substantial improvement of the state of the art for several languages, while at the same time reducing both the number of features and the running time by up to 80 in some cases.
Feature selection has been a staple of statistical NLP since its beginnings, notably selection via frequency cut-offs in part-of-speech tagging @cite_11 . Since then efforts have been made to tie feature selection with model optimization. For instance, used greedy forward selection with respect to model log-likelihood to select features for named entity recognition. Sparse priors, such as L1 regularization, are a common feature selection technique that trades off feature sparsity with the model's objective @cite_8 . extended such sparse regularization techniques to allow a model to deselect entire feature templates, potentially saving entire blocks of feature extraction computation. However, current systems still tend to employ millions of features without selection, relying primarily on model regularization to combat overfitting. Selection of morphological attributes has been carried out previously in and selection of features under similar constraints was carried out by .
@cite_8 @cite_11
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Linear models have enjoyed great success in structured prediction in NLP. While a lot of progress has been made on efficient training with several loss functions, the problem of endowing learners with a mechanism for feature selection is still unsolved. Common approaches employ ad hoc filtering or L1-regularization; both ignore the structure of the feature space, preventing practicioners from encoding structural prior knowledge. We fill this gap by adopting regularizers that promote structured sparsity, along with efficient algorithms to handle them. Experiments on three tasks (chunking, entity recognition, and dependency parsing) show gains in performance, compactness, and model interpretability. By removing the irrelevant and redundant features, feature selection aims to find a compact representation of the original feature with good generalization ability. With the prevalence of unlabeled data, unsupervised feature selection has shown to be effective in alleviating the curse of dimensionality, and is essential for comprehensive analysis and understanding of myriads of unlabeled high dimensional data. Motivated by the success of low-rank representation in subspace clustering, we propose a regularized self-representation (RSR) model for unsupervised feature selection, where each feature can be represented as the linear combination of its relevant features. By using L 2 , 1 -norm to characterize the representation coefficient matrix and the representation residual matrix, RSR is effective to select representative features and ensure the robustness to outliers. If a feature is important, then it will participate in the representation of most of other features, leading to a significant row of representation coefficients, and vice versa. Experimental analysis on synthetic and real-world data demonstrates that the proposed method can effectively identify the representative features, outperforming many state-of-the-art unsupervised feature selection methods in terms of clustering accuracy, redundancy reduction and classification accuracy. HighlightsA regularized self-representation (RSR) model is proposed for unsupervised feature selection.An iterative reweighted least-squares algorithm is proposed to solve the RSR model.The proposed method shows superior performance to state-of-the-art. Feature selection is an important component of many machine learning applications. Especially in many bioinformatics tasks, efficient and robust feature selection methods are desired to extract meaningful features and eliminate noisy ones. In this paper, we propose a new robust feature selection method with emphasizing joint l2,1-norm minimization on both loss function and regularization. The l2,1-norm based loss function is robust to outliers in data points and the l2,1-norm regularization selects features across all data points with joint sparsity. An efficient algorithm is introduced with proved convergence. Our regression based objective makes the feature selection process more efficient. Our method has been applied into both genomic and proteomic biomarkers discovery. Extensive empirical studies are performed on six data sets to demonstrate the performance of our feature selection method. Nowadays, many disciplines have to deal with big datasets that additionally involve a high number of features. Feature selection methods aim at eliminating noisy, redundant, or irrelevant features that may deteriorate the classification performance. However, traditional methods lack enough scalability to cope with datasets of millions of instances and extract successful results in a delimited time. This paper presents a feature selection algorithm based on evolutionary computation that uses the MapReduce paradigm to obtain subsets of features from big datasets. The algorithm decomposes the original dataset in blocks of instances to learn from them in the map phase; then, the reduce phase merges the obtained partial results into a final vector of feature weights, which allows a flexible application of the feature selection procedure using a threshold to determine the selected subset of features. The feature selection method is evaluated by using three well-known classifiers (SVM, Logistic Regression, and Naive Bayes) implemented within the Spark framework to address big data problems. In the experiments, datasets up to 67 millions of instances and up to 2000 attributes have been managed, showing that this is a suitable framework to perform evolutionary feature selection, improving both the classification accuracy and its runtime when dealing with big data problems.