Nikko Ström (1994): "Optimising the Lexical Representation to Speed Up A* Lexical Search," STL QPSR 2-3/1994

Optimising the Lexical Representation to Speed Up A* Lexical Search

Abstract -- The A* algorithm is defined in a directed graph formalism. Pruning, path merging and modification of the algorithm to output word graphs rather than N-best lists are discussed. The concept of quotient graph is utilised to improve of the lexical graph. Results from experiments with the continuous speech recognition task of the WAXHOLM project are reported. The use of a particular quotient graph in the first pass of the A* algorithm is shown to speed up the search significantly without degrading the accuracy.