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I am trying to get started with HTK, I grabbed a copy, compiled it, grabbed the book, and all went more or less fine, little troubles here and there but nothing serious.

Now after reading the book and googling quite a while, I do not see any documentation for the essential part for me: HTKLib. Everything is described into the smallest detail for all HTK tool programs (scriptable command line interface tools) but I cannot find a single example or tutorial how to actually call the lib.

Could anyone point me into a direction? The source code for the respective tools is included, but it would be rather cumbersome to have to extract the information for a reputable library by reading the source code... I would have expected a little more documentation , but maybe I simply overlooked it?

Any help is deeply appreciated,

Tom

edit: I was trying to use HTK for computer vision purposes, not for NLP, and for that I required that I could link against it, and call it from within my code. Thanks for your replies.

Tom
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2 Answers2

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Maybe ATK is more suitable for you. Here is the explantation from the ATK site:

"ATK is an API designed to facilitate building experimental applications for HTK. It consists of a C++ layer sitting on top of the standard HTK libraries."

In addition Microsoft Research has another research tool here for training acoustic models. This includes a set visual project for HTKlib and a set of C++ HTK wrappers, but it may only include a subset of the HTK functionality and has licence restrictions.

Paul Dixon
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I have not used it but use I the language modeling toolkit. I think the main intention is to use the command line tools provided. I imagine they are very flexible tools that will enable you to build and test models. Why do you want to use the code?

Also what are you trying to do?

madmik3
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  • I am developing a gesture recognition solution and I want to use HMMs for dynamic gestures. Making calls to external apps is too much overhead and imo an unclean solution for my problem. I want to link against the HTK libs and use the functions internally. – Tom Mar 16 '11 at 14:14
  • I suggest trying to make a test case work via the command line first, and then taking it from there. I suspect building and tuning for this problem will take a little while. Once you have some test cases and can evaluate your models, then start looking at how to apply the models in code. It should not be that hard to understand at that point. – madmik3 Mar 16 '11 at 14:27
  • Would be a wise course of action, the only problem is, I am not starting from scratch, I have a working system running on a Bayesian Classifier which exhibits unpleasant accuracy, and I wanted to plug in a HMM without starting all over from scatch. My models, features etc exist already. With a decent API spec I wouldn't have to burn so much time, so I hoped I wouldn't have to spend a whole man-week "just swapping the classifier" (yea I knew it's not gonna be that simple. but I also didn't expect it to be that cumbersome) – Tom Mar 16 '11 at 15:10
  • I see. Yeah, with HMMs there tend to be no free, or even cheap lunch :) – madmik3 Mar 16 '11 at 15:13
  • Well, it's gonna be the hard way then, thanks for your help, gonna do it by your suggested way :) – Tom Mar 16 '11 at 15:36