    mkbingram

MKBINGRAM(1)

NAME
    mkbingram
   - make binary N-gram from ARPA N-gram file

SYNOPSIS

mkbingram [-nlr forward_ngram.arpa] [-nrl backward_ngram.arpa] [-d old_bingram_file] {output_bingram_file}

DESCRIPTION

mkbingram is a tool to convert N-gram definition file(s) in ARPA standard format to a compact Julius binary format. It will speed up the initial loading time of N-gram much faster. It can read gzipped file directly.

From rev.4.0, Julius can deal with forward N-gram, backward N-gram and their combinations. So, mkbingram now generates binary N-gram file from one of them, or combining them two to produce one binary N-gram.

When only a forward N-gram is specified, mkbingram generates binary N-gram from only the forward N-gram. When using this binary N-gram at Julius, it performs the 1st pass with the 2-gram probabilities in the N-gram, and run the 2nd pass with the given N-gram fully, with converting forward probabilities to backward probabilities by Bayes rule.

When only a backward N-gram is specified, mkbingram generates an binary N-gram file that contains only the backward N-gram. The 1st pass will use forward 2-gram probabilities that can be computed from the backward 2-gram using Bayes rule, and the 2nd pass use the given backward N-gram fully.

When both forward and backward N-grams are specified, the 2-gram part in the forward N-gram and all backward N-gram will be combined into single bingram file. The forward 2-gram will be applied for the 1st pass and backward N-gram for the 2nd pass. Note that both N-gram should be trained in the same corpus with same parameters (i.e. cut-off thresholds), with same vocabulary.

The old binary N-gram produced by mkbingram of version 3.x and earlier can be used in Julius-4, but you can convert the old version to the new version by specifying it as input of current mkbingram by option "-d".

Please note that binary N-gram file converted by mkbingram of version 4.0 and later cannot be read by older Julius 3.x.

OPTIONS

-nlr forward_ngram.arpa
    Read in a forward (left-to-right) word N-gram file in ARPA standard format.

-nrl backward_ngram.arpa
    Read in a backward (right-to-left) word N-gram file in ARPA standard format.

-d old_bingram_file
    Read in a binary N-gram file.

-swap
    Swap BOS word <s> and EOS word </s> in N-gram.

output_bingram_file
    binary N-gram file name to output.

EXAMPLES

Convert a set of forward and backward N-gram in ARPA format into Julius binary form:

Convert a single forward 4-gram in ARPA format into a binary file:

Convert old binary N-gram file to current format:

SEE ALSO

julius ( 1 ) , mkbinhmm ( 1 ) , mkbinhmmlist ( 1 )

COPYRIGHT

Copyright (c) 1997-2000 Information-technology Promotion Agency, Japan

Copyright (c) 1991-2008 Kawahara Lab., Kyoto University

Copyright (c) 2000-2005 Shikano Lab., Nara Institute of Science and Technology

Copyright (c) 2005-2008 Julius project team, Nagoya Institute of Technology

LICENSE

The same as Julius.