One of the main obstacles to producing high quality joint models is the lack of jointly annotated data. Joint modeling of multiple natural language processing tasks outperforms single-task models learned from the same data, but still underperforms compared to single-task models learned on the more abundant quantities of available single-task annotated data. In this paper we present a novel model which makes use of additional single-task annotated data to improve the performance of a joint model. Our model utilizes a hierarchical prior to link the feature weights for shared features in several single-task models and the joint model. Experiments on joint parsing and named entity recognition, using the OntoNotes corpus, show that our hierarchical joint model can produce substantial gains over a joint model trained on only the jointly annotated data.
Jenny Rose Finkel, Christopher D. Manning