Named Entity (NE) recognition is a task in which proper nouns and numerical information are extracted from documents and are classified into categories such as person, organization, and date. It is a key technology of Information Extraction and Open-Domain Question Answering. First, we show that an NE recognizer based on Support Vector Machines (SVMs) gives better scores than conventional systems. However, off-the-shelf SVM classifiers are too inefficient for this task. Therefore, we present a method that makes the system substantially faster. This approach can also be applied to other similar tasks such as chunking and part-of-speech tagging. We also present an SVM-based feature selection method and an efficient training method.

We present a hierarchical phrase-based statistical machine translation in which a target sentence is efficiently generated in left-to-right order. The model is a class of synchronous-CFG with a Greibach Normal Form-like structure for the projected production rule: The paired target-side of a production rule takes a phrase prefixed form. The decoder for the targetnormalized form is based on an Earlystyle top down parser on the source side. The target-normalized form coupled with our top down parser implies a left-toright generation of translations which enables us a straightforward integration with ngram language models. Our model was experimented on a Japanese-to-English newswire translation task, and showed statistically significant performance improvements against a phrase-based translation system.

Extracting sentences that contain important information from a document is a form of text summarization. The technique is the key to the automatic generation of summaries similar to those written by humans. To achieve such extraction, it is important to be able to integrate heterogeneous pieces of information. One approach, parameter tuning by machine learning, has been attracting a lot of attention. This paper proposes a method of sentence extraction based on Support Vector Machines (SVMs). To confirm the method's performance, we conduct experiments that compare our method to three existing methods. Results on the Text Summarization Challenge (TSC) corpus show that our method offers the highest accuracy. Moreover, we clarify the different features effective for extracting different document genres.

This paper proposes a framework for training Conditional Random Fields (CRFs) to optimize multivariate evaluation measures, including non-linear measures such as F-score. Our proposed framework is derived from an error minimization approach that provides a simple solution for directly optimizing any evaluation measure. Specifically focusing on sequential segmentation tasks, i.e. text chunking and named entity recognition, we introduce a loss function that closely reflects the target evaluation measure for these tasks, namely, segmentation F-score. Our experiments show that our method performs better than standard CRF training.

This paper describes an empirical study of high-performance dependency parsers based on a semi-supervised learning approach. We describe an extension of semisupervised structured conditional models (SS-SCMs) to the dependency parsing problem, whose framework is originally proposed in (Suzuki and Isozaki, 2008). Moreover, we introduce two extensions related to dependency parsing: The first extension is to combine SS-SCMs with another semi-supervised approach, described in (Koo et al., 2008). The second extension is to apply the approach to secondorder parsing models, such as those described in (Carreras, 2007), using a twostage semi-supervised learning approach. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed methods on dependency parsing experiments using two widely used test collections: the Penn Treebank for English, and the Prague Dependency Treebank for Czech. Our best results on test data in the above datasets achieve 93.79% parent-prediction accuracy for English, and 88.05% for Czech.