OpenFst

Abstract

In this invited talk, we describe OpenFST, an open-source library for weighted finite-state transducers (WFSTs). OpenFst consists of a C++ template library with efficient WFST representations and over twenty-five operations for constructing, combining, optimizing, and searching them. At the shell-command level, there are corresponding transducer file representations and programs that operate on them. OpenFst is designed to be both very efficient in time and space and to scale to very large problems. This library has key applications speech, image, and natural language processing, pattern and string matching, and machine learning. We give an overview of the library, examples of its use, details of its design that allow customizing the labels, states, and weights and the lazy evaluation of many of its operations. Further information and a download of OpenFst can be obtained from http://www.openfst.org .

The accompanying tutorial, “OpenFst in Depth”, gives an overview of algorithms, OpenFst code design and applications.