Empirical Risk Minimization with Approximations of Probabilistic Grammars

Noah A. Smith, Shay B. Cohen

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 23 (NIPS 2010)

Probabilistic grammars are generative statistical models that are useful for compositional and sequential structures. We present a framework, reminiscent of structural risk minimization, for empirical risk minimization of the parameters of a fixed probabilistic grammar using the log-loss. We derive sample complexity bounds in this framework that apply both to the supervised setting and the unsupervised setting.