In NLP, Moore and Quirk's (2008) random walks from previous local optima were faster than uniform sampling and also increased BLEU scores; Elsner and Schudy (2009) showed that local search can outperform greedy solutions for document clustering and chat disentanglement tasks; and Mei et al.
that parsing model has since been extended to make unsupervised learning more feasible (Klein and Manning, 2004;Headden et al., 2009;Spitkovsky et al., 2012b).