Given the character domain's lack of sparsity, and the large amount of available training data, we had expected the hybrid generative system to behave only as a strong baseline; instead, it matched the performance of the indicator system.
this is not unprecedented: discriminatively weighted generative models have been shown to outperform purely discriminative competitors in various NLP classification tasks (Raina et al., 2004;Toutanova, 2006), and remain the standard approach in statistical translation modeling (Och, 2003).