text: We investigate the design challenges of constructing effective and efficient neural sequence labeling systems, by reproducing twelve neural sequence labeling models, which include most of the state-of-the-art structures, and conduct a systematic model comparison on three benchmarks (i.e. NER, Chunking, and POS tagging). Misconceptions and inconsistent conclusions in existing literature are examined and clarified under statistical experiments. In the comparison and analysis process, we reach several practical conclusions which can be useful to practitioners.
  @cite_7: Selecting optimal parameters for a neural network architecture can often make the difference between mediocre and state-of-the-art performance. However, little is published which parameters and design choices should be evaluated or selected making the correct hyperparameter optimization often a "black art that requires expert experiences" (, 2012). In this paper, we evaluate the importance of different network design choices and hyperparameters for five common linguistic sequence tagging tasks (POS, Chunking, NER, Entity Recognition, and Event Detection). We evaluated over 50.000 different setups and found, that some parameters, like the pre-trained word embeddings or the last layer of the network, have a large impact on the performance, while other parameters, for example the number of LSTM layers or the number of recurrent units, are of minor importance. We give a recommendation on a configuration that performs well among different tasks.
summary: compared several word-based LSTM models for several sequence labeling tasks, reporting the score distributions over multiple runs rather than single value. They investigated the influence of various hyperparameters and configurations. Our work is similar in comparing different neural architectures under unified settings, but differs in four main aspects: 1) Their experiments are based on a BiLSTM with handcrafted word features, while our experiments are based on end-to-end neural models without human knowledge. 2) Their system gives relatively low performances on standard benchmarks Based on their detailed experiment report @cite_7 , the F1-scores on CoNLL 2003 NER task are generally less than 90