FSA: An Efficient and Flexible C++ Toolkit for Finite State Automata Using On-Demand Computation

In this paper we present the RWTH FSA toolkit – an efficient implementation of algorithms for creating and manipulating weighted finite-state automata. The toolkit has been designed using the principle of on-demand computation and offers a large range of widely used algorithms. To prove the superior efficiency of the toolkit, we compare the implementation to that of other publically available toolkits. We also show that on-demand computations help to reduce memory requirements significantly without any loss in speed. To increase its flexibility, the RWTH FSA toolkit supports high-level interfaces to the programming language Python as well as a command-line tool for interactive manipulation of FSAs. Furthermore, we show how to utilize the toolkit to rapidly build a fast and accurate statistical machine translation system. Future extensibility of the toolkit is ensured as it will be publically available as open source software.