"format error in lattice file"?

[Andreas Stolcke]

In message <ae8e0a183c36947961abcf4e19368c59 at stanford.edu>you wrote:
> Hi folks,
> 
> I've used lattice-tool to take a lattice file in HTK SLF format and 
> convert it to a file in PFSG format. This seems to have worked okay, 
> looking at the newly created file, it seems to correspond to the format 
> described in the pfsg-format man page. I used the following syntax to 
> create the file:
> 
> lattice-tool -read-htk -in-lattice htklattice.lat -out-lattice 
> pfsglattice.lat
> 
> However now I'm trying to use this new lattice file as the input to 
> nbest-lattice, to create an n-best list. Here's the syntax I'm trying 
> to use:
> 
> nbest-lattice -read pfsglattice.lat -write-nbest nbest.txt

nbest-lattice is the wrong tool.  I makes lattices from nbest lists,
not the other way around ;-)  Also, it deals with yet another lattice 
format, which is described in wlat-format(5).

What you want is the lattice-tool -nbest-decode function.  This generates
nbest lists from lattices, and you don't even have to convert them first.
In fact, it is preferable to generate nbest directly from HTK lattices.

Make sure you have SRILM 1.4.3.

--Andreas