
Why Nitpicking Works: Evidence For Occam's Razor In Error Correctors 



Empirical experience and observations have shown us when powerful and highly tunable classifiers such as maximum entropy classifiers, boosting and SVMs are applied to language processing tasks, it is possible to achieve high accuracies, but eventually their performances all tend to plateau out at around the same point. To further improve performance, various error correction mechanisms have been developed, but in practice, most of them cannot be relied on to predictably improve performance on unseen data; indeed, depending upon the test set, they are as likely to degrade accuracy as to improve it. This problem is especially severe if the base classifier has already been finely tuned. In recent work, we introduced N-fold Templated Piped Correction, or NTPC ("nitpick"), an intriguing error corrector that is designed to work in these extreme operating conditions. Despite its simplicity, it consistently and robustly improves the accuracy of existing highly accurate base models. This paper investigates some of the more surprising claims made by NTPC, and presents experiments supporting an Occam's Razor argument that more complex models are damaging or unnecessary in practice.

