[SRILM User List] Does sausage-making use timing information?

[Tim Kempton]

Hi

Does lattice-tool use timing information (if available) when transforming
lattices to word meshes (aka sausages/confusion networks)?

>From the manual pages it looks like the recommended reading for meshes is
the following paper: L. Mangu, E. Brill, and A. Stolcke, ``Finding Consensus
Among Words: Lattice-based Word Error Minimization.'' Proc. Eurospeech, vol.
1, 495-498, 1999.

The section on intra-word clustering implies that timing information can be
used. However some experiments with lattice-tool indicates that timing
information is possibly ignored e.g. one mesh derived from a lattice with
timing information (HTK) was very similar to a mesh derived from the same
lattice without timing information (PFSG). Although there may be other
reasons for this.

The reason I'm asking all this, is because I'd like to combine results from
multiple recognizers. I like the nbest-rover approach but I'd like to make
use of timing information too, partly because the output of the recognizers
are very different. So I'm hoping I can combine multiple recognizer lattices
(with -operation or), and then transform this to a mesh.

Thanks,

Tim