A Comparison of Two N-Best Extraction Methods for Weighted Tree Automata

Johanna Björklund, Frank Drewes, Anna Jonsson

Abstract: We conduct a comparative study of two state-of-the-art algorithms for extracting the N best trees from a weighted tree automaton (wta). The algorithms are Best Trees, which uses a priority queue to structure the search space, and Filtered Runs, which is based on an algorithm by Huang and Chiang that extracts N best runs, implemented as part of the Tiburon wta toolkit. The experiments are run on four data sets, each consisting of a sequence of wtas of increasing sizes. Our conclusion is that Best Trees can be recommended when the input wtas exhibit a high or unpredictable degree of nondeterminism, whereas Filtered Runs is the better option when the input wtas are large but essentially deterministic.