Finite State Transducer

A Finite State Transducer is a finite state machine with two tapes (an input tape and an output tape).

• AKA: FST.
• Context:
  • It can range from being an Unweighted Finite State Transducer to being a Weighted Finite State Transducer.
  • It can be defined by a 6-tuple (Q, Σ, Γ, I, F, δ), such that:
    • Q is a finite set, the set of states ;
    • Σ is a finite set, called the input alphabet ;
    • Γ is a finite set, called the output alphabet ;
    • "I is a subset of Q, the set of initial states ;
    • F is a subset of Q, the set of final states ; and
    • [math]\displaystyle{ \delta \subseteq Q \times (\Sigma\cup\{\epsilon\}) \times (\Gamma\cup\{\epsilon\}) \times Q }[/math] (where ε is the empty string) is the transition relation.
• Example(s):
  • a SFST - Stuttgart Finite State Transducer Tools
  • a OpenFST.
  • a Finite State Transducer Morphological Analysis System.
  • a Finite State Transducer Word Detection System.
  • …
• Counter-Example(s):
  • a Finite State Automata,
  • a Directed Acrylic Word Graph,
  • a Recurrent Neural Network,
• See: Morphological Parsing Task, Hidden Markov Model.

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References

2011

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite_state_transducer
  • A finite state transducer (FST) is a finite state machine with two tapes: an input tape and an output tape. This contrasts with an ordinary finite state automaton (or finite state acceptor), which has a single tape. ...
  • Formally, a finite transducer T is a 6-tuple (Q, Σ, Γ, I, F, δ) such that:
    • Q is a finite set, the set of states ;
    • Σ is a finite set, called the input alphabet ;
    • Γ is a finite set, called the output alphabet ;
    • "I is a subset of Q, the set of initial states ;
    • F is a subset of Q, the set of final states ; and
    • [math]\displaystyle{ \delta \subseteq Q \times (\Sigma\cup\{\epsilon\}) \times (\Gamma\cup\{\epsilon\}) \times Q }[/math] (where ε is the empty string) is the transition relation.
  • We can view (Q, δ) as a labeled directed graph, known as the transition graph of T: the set of vertices is Q, and [math]\displaystyle{ (q,a,b,r)\in\delta }[/math] means that there is a labeled edge going from vertex q to vertex r. We also say that a is the input label and b the output label of that edge.

2009

• http://www.openfst.org/
  • OpenFst is a library for constructing, combining, optimizing, and searching weighted finite-state transducers (FSTs). Weighted finite-state transducers are automata where each transition has an input label, an output label, and a weight. The more familiar finite-state acceptor is represented as a transducer with each transition's input and output label equal. Finite-state acceptors are used to represent sets of strings (specifically, regular or rational sets); finite-state transducers are used to represent binary relations between pairs of strings (specifically, rational transductions). The weights can be used to represent the cost of taking a particular transition.
  • FSTs 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. Often a weighted transducer is used to represent a probabilistic model (e.g., an n-gram model, pronunciation model). FSTs can be optimized by determinization and minimization, models can be applied to hypothesis sets (also represented as automata) or cascaded by finite-state composition, and the best results can be selected by shortest-path algorithms.

2003

• (Beesley & Karttunen, 2003) ⇒ Kenneth R. Beesley, and Lauri Karttunen. (2003). “Finite State Morphology." CSLI Publications

1996

• (Hobbs et al, 1996) ⇒ Jerry R. Hobbs, Douglas E. Appelt, John Bear, David Israel, Megumi Kameyama, Mark Stickel, and Mabry Tyson. (1996). “FASTUS: A Cascaded Finite-State Transducer for Extracting Information from Natural-Language Text.” In: Roche and Schabes, eds., Finite-State Language Processing., MIT Press.

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