Pushdown Transducer Library (PDTs)

This is a push-down transducer (PDT) extension of the OpenFst library. A PDT is encoded as an FST, where some transitions are labeled with open or close parentheses. To be interpreted as a PDT, the parentheses must balance on a path.

A PDT is encoded as an FST where some transitions are labeled with open or close parentheses. To be interpreted as a PDT, the parentheses must balance on a path. The subset of the transducer labels that correspond to parenthesis (open, closed) pairs is designated from the C++-library in a vector<pair<Label, Label>> and from the command line in a file of lines of label pairs (typically passed with the flag --pdt_parentheses). See Cyril Allauzen and Michael Riley, "A Pushdown Transducer Extension for the OpenFst Library", Proceedings of the Seventeenth International Conference on Implementation and Application of Automata, (CIAA 2012)

The following operations, many which have FST analogues (but are distinguished in C++ by having a vector<pair<Label, Label>> parenthesis pair argument), are provided for PDTs:

There are also delayed versions of these algorithms where possible. See the header files for additional information including options. Note with this FST-based representation of PDTs, many FST operations (e.g., Concat, Closure, Rmepsilon, Union) work equally well on PDTs as FSTs.

As an example of this representation and these algorithms, the transducer in textual format:

fstcompile >pdt.fst <<EOF
0 1 1 1
1 0 3 3
0 2 0 0 
2 3 2 2
3 2 4 4
2
EOF

with parentheses:

cat >pdt.parens <<EOF
3 4
EOF

accepts 1n2n.

This can be shown with:

$ fstcompile >1122.fst <<EOF
0 1 1 1
1 2 1 1
2 3 2 2
3 4 2 2
4
EOF

# intersect the FST and PDT; the result is a PDT 
pdtcompose --pdt_parentheses=pdt.parens pdt.fst 1122.fst | 
# expand the (bounded-stack) PDT into an FST; this enforces the parenthesis matching 
pdtexpand --pdt_parentheses=pdt.parens | 
# remove epsilons (formerly the parentheses) 
fstrmepsilon | fstprint
0	1	1	1
1	2	1	1
2	3	2	2
3	4	2	2
4

Had the input string been 112, the result of the composition would be a non-empty PDT representing a path with unbalanced parentheses. The following expansion step would then result in an empty FST.

The above recognition algorithm has the exponential complexity of conventional PDT parsing. An alternate approach with cubic complexity, which is a generaliztion of Earley's algorihtm, is:

# intersect the FST and PDT; the result is a PDT 
pdtcompose --pdt_parentheses=pdt.parens pdt.fst 1122.fst | 
# find the shortest balanced path 
pdtshorestpath --pdt_parentheses=pdt.parens | 
# remove epsilons (formerly the parentheses) 
fstrmepsilon | fstprint
0	1	1	1
1	2	1	1
2	3	2	2
3	4	2	2
4

Finally, the following invocation returns all paths within $threshold of the best accepted path as an FST (cf. Prune). The algorithm has cubic complexity when the threshold is near 0.0 (dominated by a shortest distance computation) and becomes exponential as it approaches infinity (dominated by the expansion operation):

# intersect the FST and PDT; the result is a PDT 
pdtcompose --pdt_parentheses=pdt.parens pdt.fst in.fst | 
# expand the (bounded-stack) PDT into an FST keeping paths within a threshold of the best path
pdtexpand --weight=$threshold ---pdt_parentheses=pdt.parens >out.fst