Mehryar Mohri, Fernando Pereira, and Michael Riley. Weighted Automata in Text and Speech Processing. In Proceedings of the 12th biennial European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI-96), Workshop on Extended finite state models of language. Budapest, Hungary, 1996. John Wiley and Sons, Chichester
Finite-state automata are a very effective tool in natural language processing. However, in a variety of applications and especially in speech precessing, it is necessary to consider more general machines in which arcs are assigned weights or costs. We briefly describe some of the main theoretical and algorithmic aspects of these machines. In particular, we describe an efficient composition algorithm for weighted transducers, and give examples illustrating the value of determinization and minimization algorithms for weighted automata.
Université de Rouen Normandie（鲁昂诺曼底大学）；Mohammed V University in Rabat（拉巴特穆罕默德五世大学）
Tree kernels have been proposed to be used in many areas as the automatic learning of natural language applications. In this paper, we propose a new linear time algorithm based on the concept of weighted tree automata for SubTree kernel computation. First, we introduce a new class of weighted tree automata, called Root-Weighted Tree Automata, and their associated formal tree series. Then we define, from this class, the SubTree automata that represent compact computational models for finite tree languages. This allows us to design a theoretically guaranteed linear-time algorithm for computing t…
Weighted finite automata (WFA) are often used to represent probabilistic models, such as $n$-gram language models, since they are efficient for recognition tasks in time and space. The probabilistic source to be represented as a WFA, however, may come in many forms. Given a generic probabilistic model over sequences, we propose an algorithm to approximate it as a weighted finite automaton such that the Kullback-Leiber divergence between the source model and the WFA target model is minimized. The proposed algorithm involves a counting step and a difference of convex optimization step, both of w…
Weighted finite automata (WFA) can expressively model functions defined over strings but are inherently linear models. Given the recent successes of nonlinear models in machine learning, it is natural to wonder whether ex-tending WFA to the nonlinear setting would be beneficial. In this paper, we propose a novel model of neural network based nonlinearWFA model (NL-WFA) along with a learning algorithm. Our learning algorithm is inspired by the spectral learning algorithm for WFAand relies on a nonlinear decomposition of the so-called Hankel matrix, by means of an auto-encoder network. The expre…
Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) have achieved tremendous success in sequential data processing. However, it is quite challenging to interpret and verify RNNs' behaviors directly. To this end, many efforts have been made to extract finite automata from RNNs. Existing approaches such as exact learning are effective in extracting finite-state models to characterize the state dynamics of RNNs for formal languages, but are limited in the scalability to process natural languages. Compositional approaches that are scablable to natural languages fall short in extraction precision. In this paper, we i…
Whispering is an important mode of human speech, but no end-to-end recognition results for it were reported yet, probably due to the scarcity of available whispered speech data. In this paper, we present several approaches for end-to-end (E2E) recognition of whispered speech considering the special characteristics of whispered speech and the scarcity of data. This includes a frequency-weighted SpecAugment policy and a frequency-divided CNN feature extractor for better capturing the high-frequency structures of whispered speech, and a layer-wise transfer learning approach to pre-train a model w…
End-to-end simultaneous speech translation (SST), which directly translates speech in one language into text in another language in real-time, is useful in many scenarios but has not been fully investigated. In this work, we propose RealTranS, an end-to-end model for SST. To bridge the modality gap between speech and text, RealTranS gradually downsamples the input speech with interleaved convolution and unidirectional Transformer layers for acoustic modeling, and then maps speech features into text space with a weighted-shrinking operation and a semantic encoder. Besides, to improve the model …
Stochastic finite automata arise naturally in many language and speech processing tasks. They include stochastic acceptors, which represent certain probability distributions over random strings. We consider the problem of efficient sampling: drawing random string variates from the probability distribution represented by stochastic automata and transformations of those. We show that path-sampling is effective and can be efficient if the epsilon-graph of a finite automaton is acyclic. We provide an algorithm that ensures this by conflating epsilon-cycles within strongly connected components. Sam…
