Next Chapter 9. To aid speech recognition and general text processing the speech tools library provides an number of techniques to process various types of grammars. These consist of a continuing expanding set of class and related programs. These are at various levels of development but all have fairly stable and working basic features.
Support is provided for building. tuning, smoothing and running n-gram models.
N-grams themselves have been can be internally stored in either a dense or sparse . In the dense case all possible states are represented with probability distributions, while the sparece case only has those possible states for with data is available. Sparse will be much smaller in very large cases. However we consider the dense case to be the most fully developed. Formally n-grams can be views as a special case of weighted finite state machines.