OpenFst Background Material

The following material is provided as background reading about finite state transducers. However, it is not necessary to read this material before using the OpenFst Library.

For the mathematical foundations of the library, the theory of transductions and rational power series, see: Jean Berstel, "Transductions and Context-Free Languages", Teubner Studienbucher: Stuttgart, 1979 and Jean Berstel and Christophe Reutenauer, "Rational Series and Their Languages", Springer-Verlag: Berlin-New York, 1988.

For a survey of weighted automata algorithms see: Mehryar Mohri, "Weighted automata algorithms". In Manfred Droste, Werner Kuich, and Heiko Vogler, editors, Handbook of Weighted Automata. Monographs in Theoretical Computer Science, pages 213-254. Springer, 2009.

For a general discussion on the design of an FST library, see: Mehryar Mohri, Fernando C. N. Pereira, and Michael Riley, "The Design Principles of a Weighted Finite-State Transducer Library", Theoretical Computer Science, 231:17-32, 2000.

For a specific application to speech recognition, see:

• Mehryar Mohri, Fernando C. N. Pereira, and Michael Riley, "Weighted Finite-State Transducers in Speech Recognition", Computer Speech and Language, 16(1):69-88, 2002.
• Mehryar Mohri, Fernando C. N. Pereira, and Michael Riley. "Speech recognition with weighted finite-state transducers". In Larry Rabiner and Fred Juang, editors, Handbook on Speech Processing and Speech Communication, Part E: Speech recognition. Springer-Verlag, Heidelberg, Germany, 2008.

The AT&T FSM Library shares many of the same goals as the OpenFst Library.

For an overview of the design of the OpenFst Library, see: Cyril Allauzen, Michael Riley, Johan Schalkwyk, Wojciech Skut and Mehryar Mohri, "OpenFst: A General and Efficient Weighted Finite-State Transducer LIbrary", Proceedings of the Twelfth International Conference on Implementation and Application of Automata, (CIAA 2007), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 4783. pp. 11-23. Prague, Czech Republic. Springer.

For a tutorial, see: "OpenFst: An Open-Source, Weighted Finite-State Transducer Library and its Applications to Speech and Language", a presentation at NAACL HLT 2009.

For the tutorial given at SLT 2010, see: "OpenFst: a General and Efficient Weighted Finite-State Transducer Library".

Additional references are given with the description of individual algorithms.