Publication Data
A Generalized Composition Algorithm for Weighted Finite-State Transducers
Abstract: This paper describes a weighted finite-state transducer
composition algorithm that generalizes the notion of the composition filter and present
filters that remove useless epsilon paths and push forward labels and weights along
epsilon paths. This filtering allows us to compose together large speech recognition
context-dependent lexicons and language models much more efficiently in time and space
than previously possible. We present experiments on Broadcast News and Google Search by
Voice that demonstrate a 5% to 10% overhead for dynamic, runtime composition compared
to a static, offline composition of the recognition transducer. To our knowledge, this
is the first such system with such small overhead.
