Neural Induction of Finite-State Transducers

Michael Ginn, Alexis Palmer, Mans Hulden


Abstract
Finite-State Transducers (FSTs) are effective models for string-to-string rewriting tasks, often providing the efficiency necessary for high-performance applications, but constructing transducers by hand is difficult. In this work, we propose a novel method for automatically constructing unweighted FSTs following the hidden state geometry learned by a recurrent neural network. We evaluate our methods on real-world datasets for morphological inflection, grapheme-to-phoneme prediction, and historical normalization, showing that the constructed FSTs are highly accurate and robust for many datasets, massively outperforming classical transducer learning algorithms by up to 87% accuracy on held-out test sets.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-acl.1411
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
28322–28336
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.1411/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Michael Ginn, Alexis Palmer, and Mans Hulden. 2026. Neural Induction of Finite-State Transducers. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026, pages 28322–28336, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Neural Induction of Finite-State Transducers (Ginn et al., Findings 2026)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.1411.pdf
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