Conditional Random Fields CRF are popular methods for labeling unstructured or textual data. Like many machine learning approaches these undirected graphical models assume the instances to be independently distributed. However, in real world applications data is grouped in a natural way, e.g., by its creation context. The instances in each group often share additional structural consistencies. This paper proposes a domain-independent method for exploiting these consistencies by combining two CRFs in a stacked learning framework. The approach incorporates three successive steps of inference: First, an initial CRF processes single instances as usual. Next, we apply rule learning collectively on all labeled outputs of one context to acquire descriptions of its specific properties. Finally, we utilize these descriptions as dynamic and high quality features in an additional stacked CRF. The presented approach is evaluated with a real-world dataset for the segmentation of references and achieves a significant reduction of the labeling error.

Often we wish to predict a large number of variables that depend on each other as well as on other observed variables. Structured prediction methods are essentially a combination of classification and graphical modeling, combining the ability of graphical models to compactly model multivariate data with the ability of classification methods to perform prediction using large sets of input features. This tutorial describes conditional random fields, a popular probabilistic method for structured prediction. CRFs have seen wide application in natural language processing, computer vision, and bioinformatics. We describe methods for inference and parameter estimation for CRFs, including practical issues for implementing large scale CRFs. We do not assume previous knowledge of graphical modeling, so this tutorial is intended to be useful to practitioners in a wide variety of fields.