Tutorial: $\ddot{I}†$-Transductions in OpenFst via the Gallic Semiring

Abstract

OpenFst, a popular finite-state transducer library, supports $\ddot{I}†$-transitions but, due to an implementation constraint, they cannot be used with transducers in a straightforward way. In this short tutorial, we describe how one can use other functionality provided by OpenFst (namely, the Gallic semiring) to correctly implement $\ddot{I}†$-transductions and demonstrate it by implementing the MaxMatch (WordPiece) tokenization algorithm (Devlin et al., 2019; Song et al., 2021). Accompanying self-contained code examples are provided. https://www.openfst.org/twiki/pub/Contrib/FstContrib/phi_transduction_tutorial_code.tgz

8 pages, 2 figures, code included