Incremental construction of minimal acyclic finite-state automata

In this paper, we describe a new method for constructing minimal, deterministic, acyclic finite-state automata from a set of strings. Traditional methods consist of two phases: the first to construct a trie, the second one to minimize it. Our approach is to construct a minimal automaton in a single phase by adding new strings one by one and minimizing the resulting automaton on-the-fly. We present a general algorithm as well as a specialization that relies upon the lexicographical ordering of the input strings.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figure

Speech Recognition by Composition of Weighted Finite Automata

We present a general framework based on weighted finite automata and weighted finite-state transducers for describing and implementing speech recognizers. The framework allows us to represent uniformly the information sources and data structures used in recognition, including context-dependent units, pronunciation dictionaries, language models and lattices. Furthermore, general but efficient algorithms can used for combining information sources in actual recognizers and for optimizing their application. In particular, a single composition algorithm is used both to combine in advance information sources such as language models and dictionaries, and to combine acoustic observations and information sources dynamically during recognition.Comment: 24 pages, uses psfig.st

Creating and Weighting Hunspell Dictionaries as Finite-State Automata

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Building and Using Existing Hunspell Dictionaries and TEX Hyphenators as Finite-State Automata

Volume: 5 Proceeding volume: 5There are numerous formats for writing spellcheckers for open-source systems and there are many descriptions for languages written in these formats. Similarly, for word hyphenation by computer there are TEX rules for many languages. In this paper we demonstrate a method for converting these spell-checking lexicons and hyphenation rule sets into finite-state automata, and present a new finite-state based system for writer’s tools used in current open-source software such as Firefox, OpenOffice.org and enchant via the spell-checking library voikko.Peer reviewe