UMIACS Computational Linguistics Colloquium Series, December 11, 1997

UMIACS Computational Linguistics Colloquium Series, December 11, 1997


Stochastic Attribute-Value Grammars


Steven Abney
AT&T Research

Stochastic grammars are a topic of central interest in current computational linguistic research. Stochastic regular and context-free grammars are widespread, and parsing and parameter-estimation methods for them are well-known. There have been attempts to extend these methods to attribute-value grammars, but none of them provide a correct parameter-estimation method, in the sense of one that converges to even a local maximum of likelihood.

In this talk, I show that the Improved Iterative Scaling procedure of Della Pietra, Della Pietra, and Lafferty can be adapted to provide a correct parameter-estimation method for stochastic attribute-value grammars.


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