Structured prediction

Structured prediction or structured (output) learning is an umbrella term for supervised machine learning techniques that involves predicting structured objects, rather than scalar discrete or real values. Similar to commonly used supervised learning techniques, structured prediction models are typically trained by means of observed data in which the true prediction value is used to adjust model parameters. Due to the complexity of the model and the interrelations of predicted variables the process of prediction using a trained model and of training itself is often computationally infeasible and approximate inference and learning methods are used. For example, the problem of translating a natural language sentence into a syntactic representation such as a parse tree can be seen as a structured prediction problem in which the structured output domain is the set of all possible parse trees. Structured prediction is also used in a wide variety of application domains including bioinformatics, natural language processing, speech recognition, and computer vision. Sequence tagging is a class of problems prevalent in natural language processing, where input data are often sequences (e.g. sentences of text). The sequence tagging problem appears in several guises, e.g. part-of-speech tagging and named entity recognition. In POS tagging, for example, each word in a sequence must receive a "tag" (class label) that expresses its "type" of word: {| | This