This page describes an experimental tool created by WoodleyPackard to train maximum entropy models for statistical disambiguation. The .mem files produced by this method are compatible with ACE and may also work with other tools, although they are missing some metadata (if you discover they don't work with some tool and you want them to, and especially if you know why, I'd be happy to hear).

This as-yet unnamed tool uses the method of Miyao and Tsujii (2002), which trains a discriminative model using a packed representation of the full parse forest. This is in contrast to the traditional method of building parse selection models employed by DELPH-IN, i.e. using TADM with an explicitly enumerated top-500 list. Although the feature-forests method is arguably more principled (although there are also ways in which it is less principled -- for instance depending on the packing method employed when building the forest, the negative training data may effectively include derivations which would not fully unify), empirically the resulting models perform no better (or worse) than those produced the traditional way.

The profiles used as input to the full-forest trainer take up substantially less disk space than a top-500 list; however, due to some details of the feature-forest algorithm, the memory used while training can sometimes exceed that used by a top-500 trainer.

The source code is available through subversion at: http://sweaglesw.org/a/svn/feature-forest/trunk/

To compile it, you'll need the following additional dependencies installed: libace (installed by "make install" in the ACE source tree), liba (http://sweaglesw.org/a/svn/liba/trunk/), libtsdb (http://sweaglesw.org/a/svn/libtsdb/trunk/), and mela (http://sweaglesw.org/a/svn/mela/trunk/).

To build a model, you need (at least) three things: an ACE grammar image, a TSDB profile with gold annotations, and a TSDB profile containing the complete parse forest. These can be the same profile, but usually aren't. Usage is best demonstrated by an example. You'll need two separate terminals open:

terminal-one$ ./ffmaster 1 mrs.mem
waiting for 1 workers to connect on port 2577...

And then:

terminal-two$ ./ffworker my-grammar/grammar.dat my-grammar/tsdb/forests/mrs my-grammar/tsdb/gold/mrs localhost

You should see some output from ffworker for each item in the profile as the forests are loaded, and then output from both programs as they cooperate to perform the numerical optimization. If all goes well, both will terminate (pretty quickly in this case, since mrs is not a very big dataset), and mrs.mem will be written.

You can edit the maxent-model configuration option in your grammar's config.tdl and then reload the grammar. Alternately, you can pass --maxent=mrs.mem to recent versions of ACE.