Powerful extensions to CRFS for grapheme to phoneme conversion

Conditional Random Fields (CRFs) have proven to per form well on natural language processing tasks like name transliteration, concept tagging or grapheme-to-phoneme (g2p) conversion. The aim of this paper is to propose some extension to the state-of-the-art CRF systems for these tasks. Since the number of features can grow rapidly, a method for features selection is very helpful to boost performance. A combination of L1 and L2 regularization (elastic net) has been adopted and implemented within the Rprop optimization algorithm. Usually, dependencies on the target side are limited to bigram dependencies since the computational complexity grows exponentially with the history length. We present a modified CRF decoding where a conventional language model on target side is integrated into the CRF search process. Thus, larger contexts can be taken into account. Besides these two main parts, the already published margin-extension to the CRF training criterion has been adopted.