Keynote 3: Weighted transducers in speech and language processing

Abstract

This talk will describe the use of weighted transducers in speech and language processing. Weighted transducers are automata where each transition has an input label, an output label, and a weight. They have key applications in speech recognition and synthesis, machine translation, optical character recognition, pattern matching, string processing, machine learning, information extraction and retrieval among others. We give a brief history of the field, an overview of the theory and algorithms of weighted finite-state and pushdown transducers, a discussion of available software libraries, a description of applications to speech recognition, speech synthesis, machine translation and NLP, and a short overview of current research problems.