Regular-pattern-sensitive CRFs for Distant Label Interactions

Sean Papay, Roman Klinger, Sebastian Padó


Abstract
While LLMs have grown popular in sequence labeling, linear-chain conditionalrandom fields (CRFs) remain a popular alternativewith the ability to directly model interactions between labels.However, the Markov assumption limits them to interactions between adjacent labels.Weighted finite-state transducers (FSTs), in contrast, can modeldistant label–label interactions, but exact label inference is intractable in general.In this work, we present regular-pattern-sensitiveCRFs (RPCRFs), a method of enriching standardlinear-chain CRFs with the ability to learnlong-distance label interactions through user-specified patterns.This approach allows users to write regular-expressionlabel patterns concisely specifying which types of interactionsthe model should take into account, allowingthe model to learn from data whether and inwhich contexts these patterns occur. The resultcan be interpreted alternatively as a CRF augmented with additional,non-local potentials,or as a finite-state transducer whose structureis defined by a set of easily-interpretable patterns.Critically, exact training and inferenceare tractable for many pattern sets. We detailhow an RPCRF can be automatically constructed from a set of user-specified patterns,and demonstrate the model’s effectiveness ona sequence of three synthetic sequence modeling datasets.
Anthology ID:
2025.xllm-1.4
Volume:
Proceedings of the 1st Joint Workshop on Large Language Models and Structure Modeling (XLLM 2025)
Month:
August
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Hao Fei, Kewei Tu, Yuhui Zhang, Xiang Hu, Wenjuan Han, Zixia Jia, Zilong Zheng, Yixin Cao, Meishan Zhang, Wei Lu, N. Siddharth, Lilja Øvrelid, Nianwen Xue, Yue Zhang
Venues:
XLLM | WS
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
26–35
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/acl25-workshop-ingestion/2025.xllm-1.4/
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Cite (ACL):
Sean Papay, Roman Klinger, and Sebastian Padó. 2025. Regular-pattern-sensitive CRFs for Distant Label Interactions. In Proceedings of the 1st Joint Workshop on Large Language Models and Structure Modeling (XLLM 2025), pages 26–35, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Regular-pattern-sensitive CRFs for Distant Label Interactions (Papay et al., XLLM 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/acl25-workshop-ingestion/2025.xllm-1.4.pdf