Efficient text chunking using linear kernel with masked method

In this paper, we proposed an efficient and accurate text chunking system using linear SVM kernel and a new technique called masked method. Previous researches indicated that systems combination or external parsers can enhance the chunking performance. However, the cost of constructing multi-classifiers is even higher than developing a single processor. Moreover, the use of external resources will complicate the original tagging process. To remedy these problems, we employ richer features and propose a masked-based method to solve unknown word problem to enhance system performance. In this way, no external resources or complex heuristics are required for the chunking system. The experiments show that when training with the CoNLL-2000 chunking dataset, our system achieves 94.12 in F(b) rate with linear. Furthermore, our chunker is quite efficient since it adopts a linear kernel SVM. The turn-around tagging time on CoNLL-2000 testing data is less than 50 s which is about 115 times than polynomial kernel SVM. 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.