Optimization Algorithms and Applications for Speech and Language Processing

Optimization techniques have been used for many years in the formulation and solution of computational problems arising in speech and language processing. Such techniques are found in the Baum-Welch, extended Baum-Welch (EBW), Rprop, and GIS algorithms, for example. Additionally, the use of regularization terms has been seen in other applications of sparse optimization. This paper outlines a range of problems in which optimization formulations and algorithms play a role, giving some additional details on certain application problems in machine translation, speaker/language recognition, and automatic speech recognition. Several approaches developed in the speech and language processing communities are described in a way that makes them more recognizable as optimization procedures. Our survey is not exhaustive and is complemented by other papers in this volume.