UWEE Tech Report Series

Factored Language Models Tutorial


UWEETR-2008-0004

Author(s):
Katrin Kirchhoff, Jeff Bilmes, Kevin Duh

Keywords:
language modeling, factored language models

Abstract

The Factored Language Model (FLM) is a flexible framework for incorporating various information sources, such as morphology and part-of-speech, into language modeling. FLMs have so far been successfully applied to tasks such as speech recognition and machine translation; it has the potential to be used in a wide variety of problems in estimating probability tables from sparse data. This tutorial serves as a comprehensive description of FLMs and related algorithms. We document the FLM functionalities as implemented in the SRI Language Modeling toolkit and provide an introductory walk-through using FLMs on an actual dataset. Our goal is to provide an easy-to-understand tutorial and reference for researchers interested in applying FLMs to their problems.

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