I found the new approach to segmentation and information extraction fairly interesting. I'm glad the authors gave some introductory material on HMMs as a bit of a refresher and for comparison purposes. However, I would like to have seen a bit more explaination of the differences (and implications of the differences) between HMMs and MEMMs.

As with other papers that I have seen by these authors, I found some of the notation excessive. I think some of the ideas and algorithms could have been presented more clearly (though, to be fair, the authors do a good job of this in parts of the paper, just not all).

Overall, I think the paper could have benefitted from a bit more length (such as a journal publication). In particular, I would have liked to see the experimental section flushed out a bit. How well does this method perform on IE tasks? Along these same lines, I would liked to have seen a better experimental comparison between methods (particularly HMMs). One last note, I think the authors should have included more information about the dataset. How many question/answer pairs are on a given page? I assume more than just a couple, since they train on a single page.