  We introduce a framework for unsupervised learning of structured predictors
with overlapping, global features. Each input's latent representation is
predicted conditional on the observable data using a feature-rich conditional
random field. Then a reconstruction of the input is (re)generated, conditional
on the latent structure, using models for which maximum likelihood estimation
has a closed-form. Our autoencoder formulation enables efficient learning
without making unrealistic independence assumptions or restricting the kinds of
features that can be used. We illustrate insightful connections to traditional
autoencoders, posterior regularization and multi-view learning. We show
competitive results with instantiations of the model for two canonical NLP
tasks: part-of-speech induction and bitext word alignment, and show that
training our model can be substantially more efficient than comparable
feature-rich baselines.
