Using HFST for Creating Computational Linguistic Applications

HFST – Helsinki Finite-State Technology (hfst.sf.net) is a framework for compiling and applying linguistic descriptions with finitestate methods. HFST currently collects some of the most important finite-state tools for creating morphologies and spellcheckers into one open-source platform and supports extending and improving the descriptions with weights to accommodate the modeling of statistical information. HFST offers a path from language descriptions to efficient language applications. In this article, we focus on aspects of HFST that are new to the end user, i.e. new tools, new features in existing tools, or new language applications, in addition to some revised algorithms that increase performance.