Description
Introduction
This assignment gives you hands-on experience on using HMMs on part-ofspeech tagging. We will use the Wall Street Journal section of the Penn
Treebank to build an HMM model for part-of-speech tagging. In the folder
named data, there are three files: train, dev and test.
In the files of train and
dev, we provide you with the sentences with human-annotated part-of-speech
tags. In the file of test, we provide only the raw sentences that you need to
predict the part-of-speech tags. The data format is that, each line contains
three items separated by the tab symbol ‘\t’.
The first item is the index of
the word in the sentence. The second item is the word type and the third
item is the corresponding part-of-speech tag. There will be a blank line at
the end of one sentence.
Task 1: Vocabulary Creation (20 points)
The first task is to create a vocabulary using the training data. In HMM,
one important problem when creating the vocabulary is to handle unknown
words. One simple solution is to replace rare words whose occurrences are
less than a threshold (e.g. 3) with a special token ‘< unk >’.
Task. Creating a vocabulary using the training data in the file train and
output the vocabulary into a txt file named vocab.txt. The format of the
ocabulary file is that each line contains a word type, its index in
the vocabulary and its occurrences, separated by the tab symbol
‘\t’. The first line should be the special token ‘< unk >’ and the
following lines should be sorted by its occurrences in descending
1
order.
Note that we can only use the training data to create the vocabulary, without touching the development and test data. What is the selected
threshold for unknown words replacement? What is the total size of your
vocabulary and what is the total occurrences of the special token ‘< unk >’
after replacement?
Task 2: Model Learning (20 points)
The second task is to learn an HMM from the training data. Remember that
the solution of the emission and transition parameters in HMM are in the
following formulation:
t(s
′
|s) = count(s→s
′
)
count(s)
e(x|s) = count(s→x)
count(s)
where t(·|·) is the transition parameter and e(·|·) is the emission parameter.
Task. Learning a model using the training data in the file train and output
the learned model into a model file in json format, named hmm.json. The
model file should contains two dictionaries for the emission and transition
parameters, respectively. The first dictionary, named transition, contains
items with pairs of (s, s′
) as key and t(s
′
|s) as value.
The second dictionary,
named emission, contains items with pairs of (s, x) as key and e(x|s) as value.
How many transition and emission parameters in your HMM?
Task 3: Greedy Decoding with HMM (30 points)
The third task is to implement the greedy decoding algorithm with HMM.
Task. Implementing the greedy decoding algorithm and evaluate it on the
development data. What is the accuracy on the dev data? Predicting the
part-of-speech tags of the sentences in the test data and output the predictions in a file named greedy.out, in the same format of training da
Task 4: Viterbi Decoding with HMM (30 Points)
The fourth task is to implement the viterbi decoding algorithm with HMM.
2 CSCI544 Homework Assignment №2
Task. Implementing the viterbi decoding algorithm and evaluate it on the
development data. What is the accuracy on the dev data? Predicting the
part-of-speech tags of the sentences in the test data and output the predictions in a file named viterbi.out, in the same format of training data.
Submission
Please follow the instructions and submit a zipped folder containing:
1. A txt file named vocab.txt, containing the vocabulary created on the
training data. The format of the vocabulary file is that each line contains a word type, its index and its occurrences, separated by the tab
symbol ‘\t’. (see task 1).
2. A json file named hmm.json, containing the emission and transition
probabilities (see task 2).
3. Two prediction files named greedy.out and viterbi.out, containing the
predictions of your model on the test data with the greedy and viterbi
decoding algorithms. You also need to submit your python code and
a README file to describe how to run your code to produce your
prediction files. (see task 3 and task 4).
4. A PDF file which contains answers to the questions in the assignment
along with brief explanations about your solution.
