Jeff on learning transducers (09/20)

This week Jeff will be presenting joint work with Rémi Eyraud and Dakotah Lambert.

Much of phonology is centered around studying maps from underlying representations to surface representations, in the form of OT grammars, phonological rules and other formalisms.

Often these representation can be viewed as strings of symbols and in that case we can study these maps by looking at the finite state transducers (FSTs) that instantiate them.

Jeff will introduce us to a particular problem of learning string to string functions that are consistent with the structure of a deterministic FST, along with a sketch of a solution based on solving a system of string equations.

A conjecture regarding the nature of a sufficient sample will also be discussed.