Understanding the Yarowsky Algorithm

  • Authors:
  • Steven Abney

  • Affiliations:
  • -

  • Venue:
  • Computational Linguistics
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

Many problems in computational linguistics are well suited for bootstrapping (semisupervised learning) techniques. The Yarowsky algorithm is a well-known bootstrapping algorithm, but it is not mathematically well understood. This article analyzes it as optimizing an objective function. More specifically, a number of variants of the Yarowsky algorithm (though not the original algorithm itself) are shown to optimize either likelihood or a closely related objective function K.