Understanding the Yarowsky algorithm

Abstract

Many problems in computational linguistics are well suited for bootstrapping (semisupervised learning) techniques. The Yarowsky algorithm is a well-known bootstrapping algorithm, but it is not mathematically well understood. This article analyzes it as optimizing an objective function. More specifically, a number of variants of the Yarowsky algorithm (though not the original algorithm itself) are shown to optimize either likelihood or a closely related objective function K.