SRILM 1.5.6 released

[Andreas Stolcke]

Happy New Year!

The latest version of SRILM is available from 
http://www.speech.sri.com/projects/srilm/download.html .

This release features much enhanced support for server-based LMs and 
improved documentation.

Enjoy,

Andreas

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1.5.6   2 January 2008

        Functionality:

        * New ngram -use-server option to run the client side of a network LM
        server as implemented by ngram -server-port.  Optionally, probabilities
        may be cached in the client (option -cache-served-ngrams).
        Mixtures of one or more network and file-based LMs are also possible.

        * Likewise, disambig, hidden-gram, and lattice-tool understand the
        -use-server option.

        * New LMClient class to implement the above (a stub LM subclass that
        queries a server for LM probabilities).

        * ngram -server-port now behaves like a true server daemon: it handles
        multiple simultaneous or sequential clients, and never exits (unless
        killed).  The number of simultaneous clients may be limited with the
        -server-maxclients option.

        * Support for 7-zip compressed files (suggested by Alexy Khrabrov).

        * lattice-tool -split-multiwords will now print a warning message
        about multiwords that were not split because their LM probability was
        non-zero.

        * LoglinearMix LM class supports n-way mixtures directly, giving more
        efficient implementation for n > 2 than recursive object construction
        in ngram (contributed by Tanel Alumae).

        Bug fixes:

        * MultiwordLM now implicitly adds all words to the vocabulary, so that
        previously unseen multiwords get split.  This has the side effect that
        OOVs will appear as zeroprob words.

        Documentation:

        * The doc/FAQ file has been expanded and reformated as a man page.
        It can be viewed with "man srilm-faq" or online at
        http://www.speech.sri.com/projects/srilm/manpages/srilm-faq.html .
        The major content additions are questions about the build
        process, how to build a "Google N-gram LM", smoothing issues,
        and OOV-handling (the latter by Deniz Yuret).  Corrections and
        additions to this document are most welcome!

        * A new manual page ngram-discount(7) gives a detailed overview of
        smoothing methods found in SRILM (contributed by Deniz Yuret).

        * The conversion of man pages to html has been enhanced to better
        handle code samples and nested itemized lists.